I see this claim so much, and it’s bullshit. Harris didn’t make a single policy concession to get Cheney on board. And why would she? The entire point of having her endorse was to send the message of “Trump is so dangerous that even people who disagree with me are choosing to support me.”

Here Comes the Sun. Simple melody, timeless lyrics, and it’s the most-streamed Beatles song out of an already strong and memorable catalog.

I really wish they’d rerelease this in 4K, the visuals are spectacular.

IMHO 2012 was the one that really broke their brains. The tea party types tried to get various firebrands on the ticket, but end up having to support Romney. Hey, at least he’s a squeaky-clean telegenic millionaire pushing the most severe conservative fiscal policies! Proceeds to get stomped by the Obama campaign so bad that Karl Rove couldn’t believe it as it was happening. THEN the establishment GOP flirts with moving to the center on immigration. The backlash against that on the right, supercharged by the mainstreaming of mobile social media (plus social justice protests and the looming Clinton campaign) was what fueled the rise of Trump.

Science location, you rube.

It’s just not practical – no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you’d only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.

The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to “set books free” they’d be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they’d still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn’t stop the files from being shared further).

It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.

Yeah, it’s basically a smart photo filter for color-correction, object cut-outs, masking, etc:

https://www.pixometry.com/en/pixometry-the-new-name-for-elpical-software/elpical-claro-pixometry/

This feels more like consolidating positions in an art department post-Photoshop because you don’t need photo editors to dodge and burn physical negatives in a darkroom any more.

I do try to block ads, but tbh it’s impossible to be mad at Google for pushing them. YouTube is a modern miracle of engineering – no other platform on the planet hosts the scale of video it does, indefinitely, with instant access, for free. It is more than fair for them to recoup the massive cost. Personally, if they had a cheaper version of Premium without the music features, I’d pay for it in a heartbeat.

I imagine it’s because of the generative AI stuff. If they’re using their servers to generate, they’re going to be responsible for what it puts out, even if it’s just responding to user prompts.

If it is just a repackaging of ChatGPT’s existing “search the web” function, I don’t know why they’d bother. It can at best summarize a page of search results for a very literal-minded query, and even then it’s often lobotomized by the fact that OpenAI has made it easy for a large number of top websites to opt out of having their pages accessible to their search crawler, which means you’re only getting a summary of the search result snippet and metadata. A competent user of Google search can run rings around it in terms of research, even with Google’s decline in quality. I guess it makes it faster to answer basic queries for recent information not in the training data, but that hardly seems worthy of a big event.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/07/12/a-wider-perspective-on-flavor

My nightly routine before bed:

• Smartle (simple word game)
• Chronophoto (guess the year five photos were taken)
• TimeGuessr (guess the year and location five photos were taken)
• Connections (NYTimes categorization game)
• Spelling Bee (NYTimes letter game)
• Hurdle (basically five linked Wordles)
• Wordle
• Strands (new NYTimes letter game)

Also try to play AntGame.io at least once a day to get a decent score.

I thoroughly enjoy MetaFilter (one of the last surviving community blogs from the 90s) and Tildes (a more recent attempt at capturing the same feel). Text-heavy discourse, minimalist design, human-scale moderation, and moderately gatekept (MeFi has a $5 fee, Tildes is invite-only). PM me if you’re interested.

Defederating Beehaw would not only weaken it as an instance, but remove its positive influence from the wider fediverse. The big platforms wield so much power and influence and money, the smaller upstarts need to connect as much as possible to stand a chance at relevance as a credible alternative. We’re all better together. I really hope you reconsider.

It’s an organic community, small enough and long-lasting enough that it’s easier to get to know people as people instead of as names on a screen you’ll see once and likely never again. The admin team is similarly small and easy to talk to, not an algorithm or a faceless corporate enforcer. The mods are paid professionals funded largely by community donations. The site is also in the process of transitioning to a non-profit management, so less risk of selling out or enshittifying itself. I like the posting and commenting culture – text-heavy, minimalist style, and a wide variety of topics often deeply researched and explored in lengthy posts by people passionate about the topic, rather than 24/7 outrage-bait headlines and viral videos. And the subsites are really fun – I mentioned AskMeFi, but there’s also a place to share one’s music, personal projects, discuss media, organize meetups, etc. I also appreciate how the mods and guidelines take a strong stance against bigotry and microaggressions – hate speech and spam are virtually unheard of. Very refreshing when the bigger platforms seem intent on pursuing growth at all costs and minimizing administrative overhead. Overall, a cozy, human-scale community that seems more and more like a throwback that we should be moving back to.

Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but my favorite eerie/creepy horror movie that doesn’t rely on jump scares or gore is The Mothman Prophecies. It’s about a journalist who stumbles across a small town haunted by this horrifying presence that seems to predict terrible disasters. The style is on point, and it’s especially creepy because it’s supposedly based on a true story.

MetaFilter! It’s an old-school text-only community blog that’s been around since 1999. I love the variety and depth of posts on the front page, and the AskMetaFilter Q+A section is super useful.

Like all fascist conspiracy theorists, it inevitably connects back to anti-Semitism.

Sinfest. Used to be a charming and funny daily webcomic about an eclectic cast of colorful characters getting into surreal and philosophical situations. Then one day in 2011 it suddenly swerved hard into radical feminism. I’m not anti-feminist myself, but the comic became obsessed with it – literally every strip was related to The Patriarchy in some way and it became extremely preachy and boring.

I checked out for the better part of a decade, and when I randomly revisited a couple years ago it turned out that the author had transited the TERF-to-fascist pipeline and turned into an extreme-right antivax conspiratorial fascist loon, of the “teachers are secret pedos” and “the war in Ukraine is a hoax” variety. Super sad to see.