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running commentary

The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.

#culture

2025

Writing about kings 2025 Apr 1
zompist's creator put a free PDF on his Patreon a few years ago, talking about nuance at the intersection of fantasy world creation and monarchies. How could a writer take notes from real world history in creating a story about a king that's believable and thoroughly thought-through?
The Toys 'R' Us in Sunnyvale was haunted 2025 Mar 21
It's not there anymore, but there used to be a Toys 'R' Us in Sunnyvale. It was haunted. Growing up here, having friends that worked there in high school, everyone knew this. Linked is an article by Katie Dowd of the SF Gate who, upon the building's purchase by REI in 2021, gets to the bottom of this, concluding that the haunting was merely a publicity stunt involving pop psychic Sylvia Browne, but that's preposterous.
Map of the Esoteric 2025 Mar 18
Another YouTube, this one to a guy who explains convincingly the flowchart of how Western Esotericism came to be, and how the different movements are related to and have descended from one another. His pronunciation of names is either a touch odd, or my understand of how to pronounce those names is wrong. But that's a minor thing.
Why Power Girl's tits 2025 Mar 18
Superhero women aren't generally known for being drawn with small breasts, but even among the buxom crowd, the size of Power Girl's tits is hard to ignore. Why? Well, in this interview with comic book writer and inker Jimmy Palmiotti (who was working on a Power Girl run at the time), Comics Bulletin staff Karyn Pinter just straight-up asks about Power Girl, "What’s with the tits?" and Palmiotti responds:
Okay. When the character was created Wally Wood was the artist that drew Power Girl, and he was convinced that the editors were not paying attention to anything he did. So, his inker said every issue I’m going to draw the tits bigger until they notice it. It took about seven or eight issues before anyone was like hey, what’s with the tits? And that’s where they stopped. True story.
Guy’s American Kitchen and Bar 2025 Feb 19
Remember that time in 2013 when Guy Fieri started a new restaurant but didn't buy the domain name matching the restaurant's name and then someone else did and used it to put up the most amazing menu? Well, I do, and I'm sharing it here because I want to.
Five Geek Social Fallacies 2025 Feb 16
This is from 2003, and I wish someone had shown it to me back then. I went in to this linked article being like "oh lol, this'll be fun, reading about all my friend's social foibles" and was immediately smacked across the face (gently smacked across the face – the author manages to smack you without you even realize you've been smacked until well after the smack has concluded) by seeing myself in the mirror. Oh good lord, I'm living a lie.
Extropia's Children 2025 Feb 2
Linked is a seven-part series by Silicon Valley veteran Jon Evans dissecting the weird underbelly of the rationalist/effective altruism communities, written in 2022 but surfacing again now due to the downright bizarre (and murderous) ZIzian death cult that's splintered away from ... mainstream rationalism? What in the five fucks is going on inside the rationalism movement that death cults can even exist within its sphere? What business do cults have with rationalism, effective altruism, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, Scott Alexander, and the technological singularity? Evans makes it clear that rationalist thought isn't a cult, but the movement sure is left smelling a lot like the techbro version of Scientology.

In light of this newest rationalist-cult mess spilling out into the larger world, Evans has written a piece updating us about the ZIzians and how their leader faked her own death before spurring several highly-educated data scientists to go about attacking people with swords among other implements of murder.

Ah yes, peak rationality.
Stop Calling Us Warriors 2025 Jan 27
This Angry Staff Officer blog makes the compelling point that Americans should stop calling our soldiers/marines/sailors/airmen "warriors" and that doing so is not only incorrect and a disservice to those who serve in our military, it's actually anti-American.
The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value 2025 Jan 15
Of all the things I'm not, I'm an economist least of all. And neither is this author, Lynn Stout, who instead is a professor at Cornell Law School. Twelve years ago she published this article in The European Financial Review which sounds very prestigious. Republishing it here is a magazine called Evonomics because it's about evolving economics... get it? Anyway.

I add its link to the commentary because it presents a cogent-sounding argument that rings true with my personal observations: that the purpose of business is much more nuanced than simply maximizing shareholder value. Maybe there's an equally cogent-sounding argument in the opposite, but we'll save that for a different day while I instead quote this piece's core point at length:
Although many contemporary business experts take shareholder primacy as a given, the rise of shareholder primacy as dominant business philosophy is a relatively recent phenomenon. ... For most of the twentieth century ... directors viewed themselves not as shareholders’ servants, but as trustees for great institutions that should serve not only shareholders but other corporate stakeholders as well, including customers, creditors, employees, and the community. ...

Yet it is important to note that shareholder primacy theory was first advanced by economists, not lawyers. This may explain why the idea that corporations should be managed to maximize shareholder value is based on factually mistaken claims about the law.

Consider first [Nobel prize-winning economist Milton] Friedman’s erroneous belief that shareholders “own” corporations. Although laymen sometimes have difficulty understanding the point, corporations are legal entities that own themselves, just as human entities own themselves. What shareholders own are shares, a type of contact between the shareholder and the legal entity that gives shareholders limited legal rights. In this regard, shareholders stand on equal footing with the corporation’s bondholders, suppliers, and employees, all of whom also enter contracts with the firm that give them limited legal rights. ...

If shareholder primacy theory is correct, corporations that adopt such strategies should do better and produce higher investor returns than corporations that don’t. Does the evidence confirm this? Surprisingly, the answer to this question is “no.”
What's the goal of society? I've always assumed it's a means of working together to make life as least shitty as can be for all of us. Maybe someone disagrees with me, but if they do it's because they're wrong. And working towards anything other than the de-shittifying of life is therefore stupid and wrong. Wealth generation is largely an analogy for making things less shitty, but as always blindly pursuing short-term gains is gaming the system – a place where the analogy breaks down and not true wealth generation.

Will the investor class read articles like this and stop being short-sighted prisoners facing dilemmas? No. But it's good to have ideals.
Neil Gaiman does disgusting things 2025 Jan 13
This is a long Vulture article which details some of the disgusting things Neil Gaiman denies doing. Well, he doesn't deny doing them, he just denies that they were done without consent. Stuff too gross for me to want to quote here, this website which is a bastion of purity. But what the fuck. And it's hard to know what to do with news like this, yet another entry on the list of powerful people who aren't content with merely being offered sex, but need to take it from their fans and employees. Can we separate a creator from their creations? Should we even bother? But what about when that person's as influential as Gaiman is, being someone who in his genre has already had impact on the next generation of creators? Not to mention someone who championed himself as an exemplar of all the things he secretly wasn't?

As Ken Pontac says while evil boils in his eyes, "Meet your heroes."
Antidisestablishmentarianism 2025 Jan 11
When I was a kid, my mother told me the longest English word is antidisestablishmentarianism. She didn't tell me what it meant, because that didn't matter to her, and if she told me where she herself learned this factoid, I've long since forgotten. My mother loved trivia for trivia's sake.

The word is weird enough that it actually has two different pages on the big wiki, one explaining the word itself and one for what is represents: opposing the separation of church and state. But as some other anonymous wikipedian once wrote on the page for the longest word in English, "The identity of the longest word in English depends on the definition of 'word' and of length," and, being wikipedia, the page's first entry is some chemical nomenclature 189,819 letters long and comes with the helpful note "whether this should actually be considered a word is disputed." Well, no shit. There's a lot of weird technical and nonsense words contending to be longest on the list, because language nerds are like that, but down the page, it is pointed out that the longest non-weird words a person is likely to encounter are "deinstitutionalization and counterrevolutionaries, with 22 letters each" (although I can't help but notice my browser's spell check balks at the former).

So what's the deal with antidisestablishmentarianism, why did my mother know this random word? I can only guess, but this 2009 Old Time Radio Bulletin post has a clue:
Gloria Lockerman first appeared on The $64,000 Question on August 17, 1955. The nation sat enthralled as the 12-year-old [black] schoolgirl from Baltimore spelled “antidisestablishmentarianism” correctly on America’s most popular TV quiz show. On the morning after Gloria got the spelling correct, “antidisestablishmentarianism” was the most-uttered word in every office, factory and playground in the United States. ...

In 1987, the Free-Lance Star printed a where-are-they-now type article on Gloria Lockerman. The article related: “...There was a slightly racist aspect to people’s fascination with her: This was before the civil rights movement gained momentum, and Gloria Lockerman was black. Her brilliance was in direct contrast to many Americans’ stereotypes of black people, and there is no question that in countless living rooms, amazement was expressed not only that a girl of her age could spell the word, but that a girl of her color could do it. ... The other fascinating thing is the aforementioned racial angle. Many a newspaper sentence began, 'Gloria, a Negro...'"
(The blog post also contains an amazing 1955 letter-to-the-editor angry about the racist coverage of Lockerman.) Her fifteen minutes of fame may now be forgotten, but evidence of it remains, such as it inspiring The $99,000 Answer, an episode of hit sitcom The Honeymooners. Fresh off her win, Lockerman was invited to nightclubs (um, she was 12?), to state fairs, made an honorary teacher in her home town, and was featured in news reels which would have ran before movie films which played at the cinema motion theater houses. There's a hint she was questioned during the congressional investigations into quiz show scandals which ended up killing the genre by 1958 and boosting Ralph Fiennes' career forty years later.

Lockerman even appeared in a bit on The Martha Raye Show, an apparently popular variety show I've never heard of before (some quick searching shows that Martha Raye, aka Maggie liked to feature "regular people" as guests). Martha Raye's show would be canned shortly after by its irate sponsors when Raye and another white co-star kissed Lockerman, with the follow-up episode featuring a sketch where Raye appeared to get drunk... oh the horror! But Gloria's TV fame was only taking off, with her having appeared on screen 14 different times in the four months after her debut. Like happens, after such overexposure, Lockerman soon faded from interest, and by age 45, a Chicago Tribune reporter searching for her wrote in 1987:
She explained to me that there is nothing she values more than her privacy. She gained so much fame in 1955 that, long ago, she decided it was enough fame for a lifetime. In that summer of ’55 she went from being a shy, brilliant student to an object of the country’s collective curiosity-both because she was so smart at such a young age and because the fact that she was black went against many Americans’ backward stereotypes of the intellectual capacities of black people during that era.


All this antidisestablishmentarianismism was going on in 1955 when my mother was only one year old, a touch too young to be absorbing pop culture. But not too young for her three older siblings, nor for her similarly fascinated-by-trivia father (my grandfather). My mother and grandfather are both sadly passed, but her siblings are very much still here, and might enjoy me poking around into the nonsense of their youth, so I'll have to ask next time I see one of them. But whether they remember Lockerman and her quiz show appearance or not, it seems clear that the rise of American interest in the oddly long word from the political history of England, antidisestablishmentarianism, if not it's meaning, definitely stems from this moment in pop culture.
The FBI warning on tapes/DVD is because of porn 2025 Jan 4
During that weird time in the 70s when porn became... not quite art, but something more than just porn, the San Francisco pornographer brothers Art and Jim Mitchell used their legal expertise to place restraining orders against everyone bootlegging their infamous Behind the Green Door video (the title a reference to a 1956 pop song about a private club). A Texas judge ruled that porn was for some bullshit reason exempt from copyright law, and therefore the Mitchell brothers had no case. They appealed. Quoth the SF Gate in 1999:
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the Mitchells, a decision that led to the brightly colored FBI warnings seen at the start of rented videotapes today, a contribution to our national culture for which the Mitchells are rarely thanked.
Well then. Thank you, Mitchells. Also Jim later shot and killed Art for being a drunken belligerent mess, so there's that, too.
Book Review: From Bauhaus To Our House 2025 Jan 4
Scott Alexander (pseudonymous author of high-readership blog Slate Star Code/Astral Codex Ten) is insightful and clever, if a bit "too online" for me to subscribe to outright. He's a psychologist by training and that's where he started blogging, but in the past decade his blog's contents have wandered anywhere and everywhere, with posts lengthy and frequent enough I don't understand how he would have time left enough to actually see patients.

Anyway. The post I've linked here is his book review of Tom Wolfe's 1981 critique of modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, which has nothing to do with psychology (except, you know, the psychology of spaces, man) but is fascinating anyway. Fascinating because I don't possess the stamina to read a book-length Tom Wolfe critique of anything, but also because Alexander doesn't just regurgitate Wolfe's points but actually dissects them, prods them, pokes them to see whether they hold up to scrutiny. I can't say whether Alexander's being fair to the source material (as, again, I ain't reading that, and I know zilch about modern architecture) but I can say that I like that he's churned it into something which I can digest, and thus feel enlightened by despite doing none of the work of having to actually *shudder* read the damn thing. Thanks, Scott!
Everyone Involved In Pizza's Preparation, Delivery, Purchase Extremely High 2025 Jan 4
It's been over twenty-six years since The Onion (America's Finest News Source) published this brilliant headline and it has been bouncing around in my brain every single day since.

2024

Casual Viewing 2024 Dec 30
This long n+1 article tells the history of Netflix and how it has destroyed impactful movie-making, removing the cultural importance of films.
“Apparently for Netflix, Ryan Reynolds has made $50 million on this movie and $50 million on that movie,” Quentin Tarantino told a Deadline reporter last year at Cannes. “Well, good for him that he’s making so much money. But those movies don’t exist in the zeitgeist. It’s almost like they don’t even exist.”
Censorship 2024 Dec 11
Seventeen years ago The Count taught us all a lesson in the beauty of censorship.
AI-generated feature movies 2024 Dec 11
Well, the future is here. And it's shit. Linked is a 404 Media about TCL's effort (the TV manufacturer) to create a streaming service of their own based on AI-generated "vomit" "content." And 404 co-founder Jason Koebler went to the premiere of their first efforts, which turns out, despite all the talent and money TCL has thrown at this, are unwatchable.

"But this is just the beginning" and "It's only going to get better from here" people say. Well, yes – it's difficult to see how they could get worse. "These tools are inevitable" and "we should get ahead of them" others express. The same has been said about mobile phone cameras, yet their use in Hollywood remains a gimmick.

404 Media really sums up the main prospect of AI-generated slop in this paragraph:
For every earnest, creative filmmaker carefully using AI to enhance what they are doing to tell a better story, there will be thousands of grifters spamming every platform and corner of the internet with keyword-loaded content designed to perform in an algorithm and passively wash over you for the sole purpose of making money. For every studio carefully using AI to make a better movie, there will be a company making whatever, looking at it and saying “good enough,” and putting it out there for the purpose of delivering advertising.
To extract from the article one salient point, if I may, it's that there's a reason the first company to lean hard into AI-generated shows is a company only tangential to the entertainment industry who employs zero creators.
Deep into YouTube 2024 Dec 8
YouTube is known for famous channels that post videos earning millions of views. But YouTube wasn't ever really about fame – it was about sharing video. So what's in all those everyday videos that people upload? The anonymous, random, untitled stuff that gets maybe 1 or 2 views ever? That's where Astronaut.io comes in:
These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).
Or, if you're looking to step back in time, there's also IMG_0001 which operates a similar mission:
Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.
Blue Öyster Cult's Buck Dharma talks about More Cowbell 2024 Dec 2
Twenty-five years ago Saturday Night Live had a skit mocking the recording of Blue Oyster Cult's (Don't Fear) The Reaper, lampooning the use of cowbell in that recording (a recording that was twenty-five years old at that point) with a line that Christopher Walken has since unfortunately become known for: "More cowbell." Linked is a Vulture article with the BÖC frontman and songwriter Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser on how he looks back on that skit and how it affected his life and the band. It's kinda insightful, unlike this embarrassing and awkward interview of Will Farrell by Jimmy Fallon (both of whom were also in the skit, with Farrell starring opposite Walken and Fallon forgetting his lines and breaking character).
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” 2024 Nov 23
George Carlin is full of great lines, and this might be his best.
Tulpas 2024 Nov 23
Tulpas are imaginary friends that these people believe are sentient. No, really. They have their own subreddit, which goes without saying.
Tulpas are people just like you or me, and if you forget about them or get cold feet and stop, it will essentially kill them.
Yikes.
CANS 2024 Oct 13
Explore old abandoned sites from America's westward expansion, and the thing you'll be most likely to encounter is cans. Yes, old tin cans. Why cans? This website explains why, going into the history of canning and their popularity among people living on the periphery of their civilization, and also how to identify the can's age and possible contents, if for some reason that is important to you.
Plat of Zion 2024 Oct 11
I was previously unaware that the founders of Mormonism Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, in addition to creating their modern spin on Christianity and convincing their friends that sleeping with dozens of woman (many below the age of consent) was actually fulfilling a religious obligation, had utopian dreams of planned cities. And they're about as successful as you'd imagine: enforced in Salt Lake City despite leaving the place unfriendly and hostile to everyday folks.
The Hyperlink is under attack 2024 Sep 19
The big non-branden.me platforms (i.e. Google, Twitter, Facebook) out there have set their sorting algorithms to discourage content with links to other places on the web, instead encouraging LLM-generated summaries of those places. That's why big branden.me-based websites contain huge troves of hyperlinks. I am fighting back! ...even if nobody but bots reads this website.
Blog Monetization 2024 Sep 11
b̶e̵c̷o̸m̶e̷
Little white lies about blue light 2024 Sep 11
Everyone knows that seeing blue lights at K-Mart means things are on sale and also that blue lights at night time makes you sleep less gooder. However, to nobody with a brain's surprise, one of these two claims is completely bullshit.
Economics is Really Hard 2024 Sep 6
People don't listen to expert economists even though they should, and economists have the data to back that up. The reason for this is that economics is really hard, harder than most people expect.
Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo? 2024 Sep 6
The blog post is interesting in itself, but what's really fascinating about this is the person asking it. This isn't some random internet dweeb armchair expert poking at something they don't understand. Author Alex Wellerstein is a about as much an authority on this topic as a civilian can be, and since he's baffled, therefore I too am baffled.
Market Street 1965 San Francisco Neon 2024 Aug 4
Neon-laden video clip of San Francisco’s lower Market Street in 1960s. This clip shows that every business on this strip was aglow with neon, even dentists! A bit of neon nirvana on Market Street. All of these neon signs have disappeared, except the Golden Gate Theatre and the Odd Fellows Temple.
“The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion” 2024 Jul 19
This article is from September 2000 and sadly still relevant. It turns out a good number of anti-choice, anti-women's rights protestors find themselves going to the very same abortion clinics they've protested to themselves have abortions, and then turn right around and continue protesting as if they were the sole moral exception. With the erosion of rights for all in our country and the ascendancy of Christian totalitarianism as a legitimate political belief articles like this serve as a reminder of the fundamental hypocrisy in so-called conservative morals.
Large Horse 2024 Jul 9
It's a large horse.
venicesurfreport.com 2024 Jun 23
So much of what makes the internet special is the ability to connect with individuals. Here is a story in a reddit comment about a now-forgotten website that, for a brief moment in time, brought the personalities of the people living on the beach in Venice, California to the wider world.

Update: and here's a contemporary blog post about said website.
Joe vs Elan School 2024 Jun 21
A long and autobiographic webcomic-ish tale about what it's like to be ripped out of your adolescence and shoved into an abusive prison that presents to the world as a Center for Troubled Teens, this author was instrumental (according to himself) in bringing down the institution which traumatized him. Chapters 1 to 50 are about life in the program, the remaining 50 (which get progressively longer with each chapter) are about his life afterwards and get a little bit meandering.
Ultrasonic investigations in shopping centres 2024 Jun 10
Much has been written about the surveillance state we now live in, where one can now reasonably assume that if they are in any inhabitable location they are now being recorded on video. But less noted has been the emergence of universal loudspeakers – how every public social gathering place is under a layer of ubiquitous sound projection. The muzak is one thing, but did you know that these loudspeakers play constant and ambient broadcasts of tones outside the range of normal human hearing? I certainly did not. What is the purpose of these tones? What inadvertent physiological effects do they have on us? What about on animals? Why are we making these sounds in the first place?
Magic Edge, Inc. 2024 May 12
I visited Magic Edge when I was an adolescent. It was a motion flight simulator in Palo Alto where you could pretend to dogfight against other players in modern but high-tech fighter jets. While I don't see many references anymore to this Silicon Valley Mountain View 90s anomaly, I recently read a book where the author retold his experience in the simulator. And so I did some searching online, finding not much, but did stumble upon this, a short recollection from someone who worked there, along with some photos and videos.
Burying poop in the ground... for good and profit! 2024 May 5
What if we took nature pooping to an industrial scale? Could it actually be a solution to greenhouse gas emissions? I don't understand how it possibly could be, but the people in this Verge article seem to think so, and some very large companies are throwing money at them to make it happen. Actual answer to our ongoing catastrophe or wishful poop thinking?
Where do used clothes ultimately end up? 2024 Apr 28
When you've worn a clothing a dozen, two dozen, three dozen times and it's starting to get too worn for you to think it's decent, you send it away to a clothing recycler. What they do they do with it? Turns out, a lot of it despite attempts at innovating repurposing ends up dumped in the desert in Chile and set on fire. This lengthy article goes into how and why, and what people are doing about it. You can see this spot for yourself on the Google Maps.
The world of estranged parents' forums 2024 Apr 9
I am blessed to have no estrangements in my family but boy do I love reading about them in other families via the joy that is internet gossip. Used to be just us dorks online back in the old days, but now that literally everyone is online, so with it comes those narcissistic parents who claim they don't understand why their children have stopped speaking to them. And apparently there's forums full of them, reassuring each other that their children are indeed selfish and that surely they themselves are not the problem. The trick is to remember that when they say "I just don't understand" it's codeword for "I refuse to understand" – the rhetorical refuge of assholes.
Cecil George Harris's Will 2024 Mar 31
On June 8, 1948, Saskatchewan farmer Cecil George Harris was being crushed to death by his tractor when he used a pocketknife to carved out his will into the paint on the side of the fender, "In case I die in this mess I leave all to the wife." Canadian courts accepted this carving as a perhaps the world's most unusual legal document, and this macabre peculiarity (and the knife) remain on display at the College of Law at the University of Saskatchewan.
How document copying led to flextime and world citizenship 2024 Mar 29
Another Computers Are Bad post, this one weaving the thread through the history of the xerographic process, how those xerographs were accounted for, and how that inventor later went on to create the flextime schedule and then renounce his citizenship from Germany and become a "citizen of the world."
16 Ducks That Think They’re Flamingos 2024 Mar 20
You see, they're ducks, and they're standing on one leg -- like a flamingo -- even though they're ducks -- which normally stand on two legs, or swim I guess -- but they're hanging out with flamingos and even surrounded by flamingos who are all standing on one leg like flamingos do and so the ducks are like confused or something and so are also standing on one leg -- which, again, very un-duck-like behavior, right? -- and there's a heckuva lot of them, like it's a trend or something.
Are We Watching The Internet Die? 2024 Mar 13
Linked is yet another article which begins by bemoaning the rise of content aggregators and the scam inherent in the operations of a site like reddit. That's not interesting. Yet in the later paragraphs things pick up as the author digs into the ultimate problem with "generative AI" – that we are watching it begin to enter into a feedback loop, training new models on "content" inadvertently created by other models, not on actual human work. This, the author points out, is effectively freezing AI models in time in 2023, the last year before generated content exploded and overwhelmed old-fashioned manual efforts.

Fear not, fellow internet spectator, as the brandensite will remain gloriously AI-free while we eat our popcorn watching web society burn to the ground before datacenter-backed climate change makes fools of us all.
What's up with mixed quality of HN comments? 2024 Mar 11
Sometimes the comments on HackerNews are so insightful, add so much depth to the link. Other times the comments are a dumpster file of juvenile pseudo-intellectualism. What gives? This person has a baseless theory, but in a sea of unknowability the theory's got what counts – that sense of feeling right.
Spellcraft as a Service 2024 Mar 8
"Spellcaster Talia Felix has been providing genuine magick spells since 2009." So you can just go on this website and place an order and magick will be done without you having to lift a finger... what a time to be alive.
Etymology Online Dictionary in a Red Letter Media video 2024 Mar 5
My worlds are colliding... apparently in the original Mr. Plinkett Red Letter Media Star Wars Phantom Menace review that went viral a few years back and sent me on a spiral of watching thousands of hours of their other reviews, one of the "stock" photos they used happens to be a photo of the office of Douglas Harper, the creator of my much-beloved and daily resource Online Etymology Dictionary. This is nuts. Coincidence? Or does RLM also love Etymonline?
Somebody Else's Problem Field 2024 Mar 1
I love HHG2G and have read the omnibus several times. One of the most memorable things from the books is Adams' version of a cloaking device – rather than making your thing invisible, like in Star Trek, the Somebody Else's Problem Field simply renders the object inside to be beneath notice, nothing for you to concern yourself about, invisible by way of being somebody else's problem to solve. What's so great about this is that, unlike the cloaking device, the SEP field isn't science fiction. It happens all the time, everyday, in the cities we inhabit and the homes we live in.
Google is now paying failng newspapers to create articles using AI 2024 Feb 28
Hello it is me trusted journalist Trueman McHuman here to give you a trustworthy newspaper article that is entirely original and not just a poor attempt at plagiarizing another, better website using automated tools provided by my benevolent business partner Google.com
Newspapers love to tell us how important they are 2024 Feb 28
Here's yet another New York Times article lamenting the death of the newspaper industry and saying it would be simply sad if it weren't for how "important" newspapers are. What a crock of shit. News institutions die for the same reason any institution dies – because they are bad at what they do and its product served better by other means. For journalism, people are more than happy to speak for themselves and thanks to the internet, their voice can reach you directly without the need for middlemen to muddy their words and provide inaccurate analysis. Not that newspapers have never done anything good or useful, but just like how Hollywood loves to tout their few good movies at the Oscars and hope we ignore that most of what they produce is a flaming dumpster of garbage, so goes newspaper articles. Like that lunatic Michael Crichton taught us, feeling nostalgic for dinosaurs is not a good reason to start forcing them back into life.
On tradwife influencers 2024 Feb 28
I am a man in my 40s who barely has time for my own interests so of course I am late to the tradwife trend. But now that tradwifing is penetrating the defensive walls which shield me from pop culture I can't help but be vaguely horrified. Why exactly am I horrified? For that, I turn to experts such as this blog who've already dedicated the mental cycles to laying out exactly what's going on here and how fucked up it is.

I'm not a fan of performative anything – it's so disingenuous – but performative "wifing" is layers and layers of screwed up.
Editing History, Alicia Keys, and the Super Bowl Halftime Show 2024 Feb 14
So apparently during the Super Bowl Halftime Show, Alicia Keys flubbed the opening note of her performance. I wouldn't know because everyone I was watching it with wouldn't shut the hell up. But anyway, the official recordings of the Halftime show mysteriously do not have this flubbed note, but instead have Keys singing it correctly. Is this some quick and justified editing, or are we living in a post-truth world? Do we deserve to have the error in the record as if it's a documentary, or do we deserve to have the best possible performance in our entertainment? I don't have the answers to these questions, but people are asking them, and I'm having fun noodling them in my noggin.
Ready100! to call it 2024 Feb 5
Three years ago, in February 2021, I backed a Kickstarter promising a cyberdeck-style PC featuring a mechanical keyboard, a retro-style case, and a bunch of expansion ports both internal and external. It was called the Ready100! and it had some sleek marketing on the internet cyberdeck communities. Shipping was predicted to begin in April 2021, only two months after the Kickstarter campaign finished. With a turnaround that quick, the project must've been nearly done, right?

Well, here I sit Ready100!-less, three years later, and the last anyone has heard from the project's creator was six months ago, when he posted a series of rambling, hard-to-follow updates about loans and landlords, making reference to past conversations that seem to have happened behind closed doors, or perhaps only in his head. And with radio silence ever since and the subreddit now restricted to "authorized posters" only, I'm now, personally, calling this project "dead." If I ever receive anything from it, even just an explanation of what went wrong, I'll consider it simply a bonus.
Are Wikipedia editors human? 2024 Jan 14
On the Wikipedia page for Lightning, in stating that "cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning is the most studied and best understood of the three types, even though in-cloud (IC) and cloud-to-cloud (CC) are more common types of lightning," some editor offered the technically true explanation that this is "because human beings are terrestrial and most of their possessions are on the Earth where lightning can damage or destroy them."
Taliban Militants Fed Up With Office Culture, Ready to Quiet Quit 2024 Jan 5
This was my favorite headline from 2023. The layers of irony, the absurdity, the relatability. All summed up in the quote in the article from some random internet person: “We couldn’t destroy the Taliban, but office work destroyed the Taliban."

2023

The Witch King and Fear 2023 Dec 29
A forum post from 2014 shares an interesting new perspective on what Tolkien meant in some of his key passages by gleaning parallels from Tolkien's biography.
YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads 2023 Dec 12
Caveat emptor in full effect when watching ads on YouTube, since apparently even deep fake videos of celebrities promoting scam investments do not violate YouTube's policies. As the comments point out, YouTube makes money off these ads, so they could use that money to police them, but they choose not to.
When Blindness Hits A Hundred Bucks A Share, Then Who Will Be Laughing, I Ask You, “Doctor” 2023 Nov 6
You remember the Bored Apes. Maybe. These were the dumb ugly worthless JPEGs of, like, dressed-up cartoon apes that various suckers and dolts were buying—or, like, investing in?—very loudly a couple of years ago. This was in 2021, back when NFTs (non-fungible tokens) were only a laughingstock among people capable of critical thinking.
Why are cities so full of potholes? 2023 Nov 6
City roads are often frustratingly rough to drive on. Why? This random comment on reddit actually has a good and thorough answer to this question, listing out the difficulties in getting the right materials in, the heavy amount of patching required, the high workload the streets are placed under, and constraints on the installation timelines that prevent proper settling.
Chesterton's Fence 2023 Oct 25
In sysadmin work and IT in general, I find myself reference the concept of Chesterton's Fence on a near-daily basis. Yet, many people are unfamiliar with the name, even though the concept rings instantly true. This short blog post talks about the origin of the term and also some of the implications of the dilemma.
"MSG in Chinese food isn't unhealthy -- you're just racist" 2023 Oct 14
The "whyusemsg.com" website is now defunct, but this article remains a reminder that the malignment of MSG is America and the west stemmed not from science, but from racism against Asians and Chinese in particular, viewing Chinese restaurants as dirty places that were unconcerned for the cleanliness of their food. Quoth the article: "'Calling it Chinese restaurant syndrome is really ignorant,' said restaurateur Eddie Huang ... he pointed out that MSG is not only delicious – but found in practically all processed foods, from ranch dressing to Doritos." Moral of the story: stop shunning MSG.
Berkeley's famed communal hot tub 2023 Sep 22
I've lived in the (South) Bay Area my whole life and I've never even heard hint of such a thing existing. But it sounds fascinating, a lingering hold-out from hippie culture.
2023 Annular Eclipse 2023 Sep 14
Darkness will come o'er the land! The moon will blot out the sun! Check your maps! Mark your calendars! October 14, 2023. It's happening!
Eating the Rich Sounds Pretty Good to Most of Us Right Now 2023 Sep 13
There are no repercussions. There is no justice. Meritocracy is a lie the wealthy tell themselves to project morality onto a system that exists solely to preserve their unearned status ... Regular people are not only indifferent to bad things happening to rich people, they make no effort to hide that it delights them.
Electronic Beowulf 2023 Aug 27
Courtesy of University of Kentucky, you can apparently access online for free full digitized copies of what extant copies of the Beowulf story remain, alongside transcripts and translations. Beautiful.
Unfuckable Hate Nerds 2023 Aug 4
Maybe what incels need isn't derision, but compassion?
87% Missing: the Disappearance of Classic Video Games 2023 Jul 10
Unlike movies, books, audio recordings, and pretty much everything else, video games once they pass from publication are no longer easy to experience. This places the vast majority video games ever made out of reach of almost everyone. As video games are undeniably a part of our culture, this blindness to the past damages us and should be corrected.
The Ellison Dispute 2023 Jul 1
Did James Cameron rip off a Harlan Ellison story when he made Terminator? So claimed Ellison back in 1984 when the movie came out. And considering that Ellison didn't just get paid, but also got his name added to the credits, it'd seem that the lawyers agreed with him. But did Cameron really rip off Ellison? Or did the famously litigious Ellison just outmaneuver a young, naive, newly successful filmmaker?
web pages of tilde town 2023 Jun 16
Here lies hundreds of small personal webpages made by the users of this ssh terminal-based online community. This gives me strong 'old web' vibes and I love it.
Bash.org Quote Database 2023 Jun 14
Back in IRC's heyday, when someone did a funny, the thing to do was to copy/paste the conversation log onto bash.org, where people would vote for the funniest exchanges. And not only is bash.org still there, unchanged from way back when, but so are the top-voted quotes. Read them to revisit the late-90s and all of it's hilarious misogynist racist homophobic banter.
From A-List Celebrity to Degenerate YouTube Streamer 2023 May 16
I'm not usually one for keeping to celebrity gossip, but Andy Dick's (rightful) fall from grace has been so brutal, it's to the point where you actually might feel a glimmer of pity for him. He has live-streamed not just his own surrender to addiction and abandonment by his one-time friends, but also his kidnapping, repeatedly being assaulted and assaulting others, exploitation, and absolute failure. This is a 45 minute summary of the low-lights.
Credenda 2023 May 6
This tab has been open on my phone for months and I no longer remember how I got here or why it's open. But I find the text interesting and the site worthy of not losing track of.
East Bay Hill People 2023 May 4
The site description says it best: "Explore the East Bay Hills of the San Francisco Bay Area and discover a world inhabited by our local Native Americans for over 10,000 years. Many sites are virtually untouched since missionization, manslaughter and European diseases drove these people from their ancestral homelands just over 200 years ago. Respect their history."
Japan has millions of empty houses 2023 Apr 26
This is going around the wire services lately, but underneath the journalistic crap is a fascinating insight into Japanese culture and how it intersects with Western. "Many Japanese don’t like used homes," it says!
The Developing World Thinks Hitler Is Underrated 2023 Apr 22
Hitler and his Nazis are universally known as evil, right? Maybe not:
Across much of the globe, though, openly expressed admiration for the Hitler legacy can be seen as just one more indication of the tenuousness of these social and political values in our modern world.
I'm seeing echoes here in the evolving way Americans regard Christopher Columbus.
Time and the Laundering of History 2023 Apr 22
Why do we villainize Hitler while we lionize Julius Caesar? This article delves into the tricky topic of how popular history's perceptions of conquerors of past can grow divorced from their true carnage.
Moneylike 2023 Apr 20
Another Cory Doctorow article, this one on the origins of money and why cryptocurrency isn't actually money. Maybe a touch too reductionist, but on the flip side, it's easy to understand.
The 'Enshittification' of TikTok 2023 Apr 20
Linked to in the previous article is this fun piece by Cory Doctorow, who I'm not sure if I love or find really annoying, but I at least read what he writes. It's another interesting article about the decline of yet another social media.
Social media is doomed to die 2023 Apr 20
Maybe one day I'll formalize my reasons for pulling away from social media – it was less a philosophical decision and more gut instinct – but in the meantime, I love reading articles from other people lamenting how terrible the entire landscape has grown. Even though I never even considered using SnapChat, here's a fun piece about its slow decline, and how the ecosystem drives these services all the same downward direction.
The Hollywood Personal Egg Service That Wasn't 2023 Mar 11
I fell for this 'Personal Egg Service' hoax hook, line, and sinker back when it first went around the internet. It's a mark of shame that only now, eight years later, am I realizing I was taken. I'm usually so much the skeptic! Or so I envisioned myself. Maybe I'm more gullible than I realized. Either way, the mental image of a 'scrambled egg' faucet has been firmly lodged in my head ever since, and the real story is a fascinating follow-up to a fascinating hoax.
Emoji Kitchen 2023 Mar 7
Combining two emoji into a new hybrid is more fun than it has any right to be.