~cgrayson

another day, another thousand words: 1,011 today, in which I finally got to make the silly, obscure reference I set up from the start (“better head back to 10-SE, Jed”) 📝 #1000WordsOfSummer

I didn’t get around to posting it yesterday, but I did write: 1,072 words. today, too: 1,016 words. clearly stopping just as soon as I cross the word-count line, but no apologies. six days down, eight to go 📝 #1000WordsOfSummer

I did it again; 4 for 4 so far. 1,143 words today, in which a good cop as well as a bad cop appeared 📝 #1000WordsOfSummer

a long day today, that started with a trip to the dentist for a replacement crown, and only got Monday-er from there. nevertheless, I persisted, and wrote 1,015 words this evening 📝 #1000WordsOfSummer

day 2 of #1000WordsOfSummer, and I felt so little like sitting down to write today, but I did it: 1,002 words. now my murder mystery finally has a dead body 📝

feeling less than complete confidence about managing this every day for the next two weeks, but today, the first day, I did it: 1,005 words written 📝 #1000WordsOfSummer

The Atlantic: Guilty on All Counts

The jury returned with a verdict… after less than 12 hours of deliberation. …Trump is the first current or former president to be tried for any serious crime, and now he is the first to be convicted. Not only that, but he was found guilty on all 34 counts against him.

couldn’t happen to a shittier guy

going to give #1000WordsOfSummer a shot this year. like a mini NaNoWriMo, it calls for writing 1,000 words a day, for two weeks. starts June 1. not sure I’ll do daily word-count checkins they suggest, but for the sake of non-Twitter social media – maybe! (god help me I may even join the Slack…) 📝

Temple of Kukulcan, Chichén Itzá

really appreciating Molly White’s newsletter, “[citation needed]”, and even more so as she expands beyond covering the Web3 trainwreck(s). her latest issue, AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?, is as well-written as it is well-considered. recommended

for sale: eclipse sunglasses, never worn

(not really true: it was cloudy but we got some cool glimpses despite that) 🌚

enjoying a new trivia podcast: “WikiHole”. it’s hosted by comic actor D’Arcy Carden, with other comedians as contestants, and it’s just crude & silly enough to work 🎙️

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.

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! 📚

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 📚

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