Sleater-Kinney at ACL Live 🎵

yay, the Tournament of Books starts today! with a perfectly funky, funny, & earnest judgement 📚

also, a good summary of the thing overall in the match commentary:

We deliberately created a dumb competition with no stakes. It doesn’t matter who wins. Authors are not in competition with one another, and the intention has always been to lift everyone’s boat. I think the Rooster does that. But as with all meaningless competitions, it matters a little.

Jenny Lewis at ACL Live 🎵

I’ve missed Half.com (so dead now that its SSL cert doesn’t even work; RIP Half.com), so I was excited to learn about Pangobooks. I listed a (select) handful of books a few weeks ago to try it, & have already sold 3! 📚

Jenny Lewis – The Voyager, Live at WFUV 🎵

Warpaint – Keep it Healthy (live From The Basement) 🎵

well, that’s a shame: ‘They lied’: plastics producers deceived public about recycling, report reveals

At a 1956 industry conference, the Society of the Plastics Industry told producers to… aim for materials to end up “in the garbage wagon”

good stuff from Dan Pfeiffer on how to navigate the age debate:

This election is not a referendum on whether an 81-year-old should serve another four years as President. It’s a choice between a decent, accomplished 81-year-old man who cares about you and an incompetent, chaotic 77-year-old criminal who only cares about himself.

great new effort from anti-book-banning activist Frank Strong: full contextual summaries of targeted books to pit against the outrageous, out-of-context excerpts that the book-banning mobs rely on. a good resource to fight this scourge locally 📚

World Party: Ship of Fools 🎵

avarice & greed / are gonna drive you over the endless sea / they will leave you drifting in the shallows / drowning in the oceans of history

not donating directly to any campaigns this year. instead I’m going to give to organizations that have been working for progress year in & year out – and will continue working after election day. I really like Movement Voter Project for this

(& as they say: early money goes further)

The Onion: Italian Immigrants Shopping In U.S. Grocery Stores Announce These Tomatoes No Good

“I eat this, I die by poison. This the trash section, no? You can take me to real grocery store in your car? I send my mother picture, it make her weep.”

another example of what a user-hostile wasteland Amazon is: sellers trying (and failing!) to use AI-generated product names (though that “I’m Unable to Assist with This Request it goes Against OpenAI use Policy and Encourages Unethical Behavior-Black” does look nice…)

lots of skepticism about the Apple Vision Pro. I think it looks cool (figuratively); who knows? maybe it’s a dud. but as to that $3.5k price, see the Mac Pro, starting at twice that ($7k), or the Pro Display XDR, $5k “standard glass”; $6k for “nano-texture glass”. this ain’t Gateway, folks 🐄

The Guardian: World’s five richest men double their money as poorest get poorer

the combined wealth of the top five richest people in the world – Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison and Mark Zuckerberg – have increased by $464bn, or 114%. Over the same period, the total wealth of the poorest 4.77 billion people – making up 60% of the world population – has declined by 0.2% in real terms.

from NYT Magazine: The Secret History of Women in Coding (2019). fascinating & infuriating. hit the next person you hear blathering on about meritocracy over the head with this

But if biology were the reason so few women are in coding, it would be impossible to explain why women were so prominent in the early years of programming, when the work could be, if anything, far harder than today. It was an uncharted new field, in which you had to do math in binary and hexadecimal formats, and there were no helpful internet forums, no Google to query, for assistance with your bug

was getting frustrated trying to figure out how to summon the “global micropost” dialog in MarsEdit… then finally realized two things: that’s a 5.x feature, and I hadn’t upgraded from 4. fixed!

…unfortunately I can’t set default type or categories, so I probably won’t use that feature much after all

sometimes The Onion just cracks me up: Potholes In Nice Part Of Town Filled With Italian Marble

Lucy Dacus: Map on a Wall

Oh please, don’t make fun of me

what else but a Goose Island Bourbon County Stout (this one from 2017) as the final beer from Mike’s basement stash. cheers to you on your birthday, big brother 🍻

Saturday’s beer: Widmer Brothers Brewing’s Chocolate Russian Imperial Stout (2013)
⭐️⭐️⭐️
good beer should still be good after a decade, like this tasty bottle from Mike’s basement stash 🍺

even The Guardian noticed this dumb move: MLS’s arrogant withdrawal from US Open Cup is about controlling Messi Mania ⚽️

This manoeuvring is comparable to a government that favors privatisation gradually defunding public services before declaring they are not working and that only private companies can save them. MLS has privatised and monopolised the people’s game of soccer, or is trying to.

Saturday’s beer: Save the World Brewing’s Danger Noodle Island Imperial Stout
⭐️⭐️⭐️
a little sharp; really good flavor 🍺

Saturday’s beer: Gigantic Brewing’s Most Most Premium Russia Imperial Stout
⭐️⭐️⭐️
another from Mike’s basement stash, a little flat (not sure what year it’s from) but tasty nonetheless 🍺

#lifehacks

The Guardian answers: how problematic is mineral mining for electric cars?

The data we have leaves little doubt that resource extraction will be significantly lower for electric cars compared with their petrol or diesel equivalents as recycling increases.

also:

“[Human rights] problems have always existed in mining,” [Amnesty International’s] Dummett said. “I strongly believe that this problem has been exaggerated hugely by opponents of the energy transition, the fossil fuel lobby.”

these concerns sounded like big downsides of EVs; glad to learn they’ve been overblown

via @chipotle – good, well-considered post from the Duke University Libraries: Why We’re Dropping Basecamp

We are not in the habit of running “ideological enforcement” to ensure “quick compliance” from beleaguered corporate executives or whatever it is that [DHH is] talking about in his posts. We simply have our own opinions and our own blogs, and in some cases, we have good choices available to us regarding the companies to which we give our business.

I made a thing: txt2mary, “A Twilio-to-Micro.blog-(and-Twitter) server”

This app is a special-purpose server that accepts SMS text-messages, via webhook calls from Twilio, and posts those messages to Micro.blog (and Twitter (reluctantly 🤢))

p.s. still enjoying Go

Saturday’s beer: Goose Island Brewing’s Bourbon County Brand Coffee Stout ​(2017)
⭐️⭐️⭐️
you can get anything you want, at Alice’s restaurant… though maybe not a beer as silky & strong as this (another one from Mike’s basement stash) 🍺

ok, this is pretty funny: Scomo

we’re leveling the playing field and upholding the Supreme Court’s proud tradition of accepting ethically questionable financial influence. Now, you too can bribe Clarence Thomas just like the billionaires, CEOs, & lawyers with pending cases before the court

just starting it, but the newest Atlantic (Dec. ’23) is really something. it focuses almost entirely on Reconstruction, including an annotated reprint of an 1866 article by Frederick Douglass, & an actual, full play, printed on different paper in the center of the magazine. print ftw

a few of my officemates

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