Flutterby™!: Topic : California Culture

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Entry: 2025-11-22 00:22:24.882621+01 Rohnert Parking by Dan Lyke comments 0

Yesterday, Charlene sent me an article headlined A new downtown in four years? Rohnert Park approves plan to bring ‘missing heart’ to city. The article had a bunch of interesting quotes, including this direct challenge to Petaluma's resistance to the Charlie Palmer faced hotel:

“Premier lodging is extremely challenging in the North Bay and the entire wine region,” he said. “A premier experience would put Rohnert Park on the map. People will end their wine tasting journey, come back, park their car and spend the rest of the evening in downtown Rohnert Park.”

Which, I mean, I wanna give some side-eye to the "hey, let's build a tourist industry on people driving around while consuming alcohol" attitude towards drunk driving, and wonder about further encouraging the "upscale recreational drug use" destination marketing, but respect the "Petaluma, you're on notice!" pro wrestling vibe.

I didn't look closely at the pictures. Today on Reddit there's this gem, which is best summarized as "Rohnert Parking".

It's a shame we can't see further than "let's stack a story or 2 of residential on an '80s mall".

Entry: 2025-11-21 23:27:57.883892+01 Books of the moment by Dan Lyke comments 0

A few recent watches and reads:

Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki — Wonderful cozy book about aliens and demons battling over the soul of a trans runaway, with bonus culture clash between modern and classical music. Hit me hard in the first few chapters. Didn't quite stick the landing, but I really enjoyed the ride.

The Starving Saints by Caitlin Starling — I ended up reading through it, but... there's a certain sort of cruelty in an illogical world that just doesn't carry me. I ... kinda ... connected with the characters, but the universe wasn't something I could map cause and effect to, and the world was so cruel, that the last time I remember feeling this way about a book was China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. It just never clicked for me.

Entry: 2025-11-16 16:41:28.99277+01 A few music docs by Dan Lyke comments 0

We have a month of Netflix right now because we wanted to watch The Greatest Night In Pop, the documentary about the making of We Are The World, which we've watched twice. Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen's sessions never get old, and both times through I've laughed at Stevie Wonder showing Bob Dylan how to do his lines.

Discovery on Netflix sucks, but we'd seen something about The Only Girl in the Orchestra, a short documentary about Orin O'Brien, the first woman hired to perform with the New York Philharmonic, back in 1966, so went to search for that, and right next to that in the search results was It's Only Life After All, a documentary about the Indigo Girls.

The Orin O'Brien film was a wonderful little piece, O'Brien came from a show biz family, and picked up the double bass to be a supporting character rather than a star, and the whole film had a nice soundtrack and was a great little wander through her life as she interacted with students and dealt with moving out of her apartment and the issues of retirement and winding down her life.

We had started watching a few other Netflix music documentaries, ABBA: Against The Odds, and Springsteen on Broadway, both of which we abandoned a little bit in. So when we started the two hours with Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, I didn't necessarily expect that we'd make it all the way through. Especially since this was definitely not a concert film.

But it was two hours spent taking me back to the late '80s and '90s, to Little Five Points in Atlanta, hanging out with two people who believe a better culture is possible, and Charlene and I were both wrapt.

And hell yeah I'm gonna take Closer to Fine to the next first Friday "bring something to share" gathering at Randy's house...

Entry: 2025-11-12 19:56:25.379669+01 At least use an ad blocker by Dan Lyke comments 1

My mom called me up again, recently, because her computer once again was locked in some state where a voice was warning her that the Facebook police were going to come get her or something. After going through Ctrl-W and the usual things and having that not work, we went for a reboot, and of course once the browser quit the voices stopped.

Now she's got some whackadoodle conspiracy health beliefs, and that leaves her prone to surfing the less savory aspects of the web, but that Facebook knows that at least 10% of its ads are scams (I mentioned that I'm surprised it's that low) and the Nevada ransomware attack happened because a state employee confused a malicious Google ad result with a valid download, indicates that our media culture is irretrievably broken.

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) @david_chisnall@infosec.exchange observes:

Given this and the recent Facebook news, there's a very strong case to be made that an ad provider is legally an accomplice to any crime committed by their ads. If they are profiting financially from enabling crime, they are criminals.

and... I realize that us web publishers have some legal protections, but I'm starting to think that between stuff like this and the various age verification laws going in various places, that maybe it is time to move comments and annotations into the client/aggregators that pull from various different places, and make publishers liable for what they publish.

Entry: 2025-11-12 18:07:27.458638+01 Fresno sprawl by Dan Lyke comments 0

This did not go the direction I thought it was going. SFGate: 'Absolutely asinine': Residents of sprawling Calif. city push back on proposed mega-development, on the opposition to a proposal to build suburban sprawl in the southeast quadrant of Fresno.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-11-01 18:15:03.177028+01 That boards are choosing CEOs who can't by Dan Lyke comments 2

That boards are choosing CEOs who can't understand why prayer and fasting didn't save their sinking company, and same former Intel CEO then getting investment money to build AI to hasten the Second Coming, says pretty much everything about modern tech culture... https://futurism.com/artificia...gence/former-ceo-intel-ai-christ

Entry: 2025-10-28 16:56:55.239136+01 When science teachers go bad by Dan Lyke comments 1

Sorry for the tracking spew on this link, but I think it's part of an article share. Anyway, high school chemistry teacher goes for "spew back what I wanted you to say on the test, rather than what's correct". And reading this article is giving me flashbacks.

San Francisco Chronicle: A Silicon Valley family wanted their son’s science test graded fairly. It became a battle

The district failed to acknowledge that the teacher’s answer violated scientific fact as well as the publisher’s answer key, which confirmed the correct answer was heat and light, since “combustion is a chemical reaction that typically releases energy in the form of heat and light, which makes it an exothermic process.”

Entry: 2025-10-13 17:28:35.267399+02 Sampling bias by Dan Lyke comments 0

Rolling Stone: Musk’s AI Is Being Used to Make Hardcore Porn: ‘Grok Is Learning Genitalia Really Fast!’

While OpenAI's Sora 2 is setting a new standard for video models, xAI seems to be loosening moderation on explicit adult content

In reaction ‪Elf M. Sternberg‬ ‪@elfsternberg.bsky.social‬ observed

Just think: that imagery is derived from millions of porn DVDs of jiggling boobs. The average porn starlet is far more likely to have had work done than most women. So, that "natural motion" they're praising is derived from silicone-heavy data samples.

Masculinity is doomed.

And that got me thinking about how much video is generated from attempts at going viral, and if the training data is the model, what that means...

Entry: 2025-09-24 22:35:02.885492+02 Oh great by Dan Lyke comments 0

Oh great, the other thing MacOS Tahoe 26 brought, aside from rounder buttons and new XCode crashes, is the frame rate on my external webcam suuuuucks.

[ related topics: Invention and Design California Culture Macintosh ]

Entry: 2025-09-15 19:31:32.870013+02 Notes on the Hyundai/LG/etc detentions by Dan Lyke comments 0

mtsw ‪@mtsw.bsky.social‬

I think it's a sign of how cowed the American media is that we're getting pieces like "you have to understand, in Korean culture, it's considered very rude for someone to lock you in a brutal prison camp for a week for no reason." Like yeah, any free people would be offended by that?

[ related topics: Sociology Journalism and Media California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-09-15 19:09:02.907312+02 Violence and culture in baboons by Dan Lyke comments 0

Woozle Hypertwin @woozle@toot.cat

@RickiTarr Like the thing that happened with all the ~~bonobos(?)~~ baboons where the alpha males hogged a pile of discarded food left by humans, but the food was bad and poisoned them and most or all of the alphas died and the tribe culture suddenly got a lot nicer and stayed that way?

Emergence of a Peaceful Culture in Wild Baboons

Through a heartbreaking twist of fate, the most aggressive males in the Forest Troop were wiped out. The males, which had taken to foraging in an open garbage pit adjacent to a tourist lodge, had contracted bovine tuberculosis, and most died between 1983 and 1986.

A Pacific Culture among Wild Baboons: Its Emergence and Transmission

Reports exist of transmission of culture in nonhuman primates. We examine this in a troop of savanna baboons studied since 1978. During the mid-1980s, half of the males died from tuberculosis; because of circumstances of the outbreak, it was more aggressive males who died, leaving a cohort of atypically unaggressive survivors. A decade later, these behavioral patterns persisted. Males leave their natal troops at adolescence; by the mid-1990s, no males remained who had resided in the troop a decade before. Thus, critically, the troop's unique culture was being adopted by new males joining the troop. We describe (a) features of this culture in the behavior of males, including high rates of grooming and affiliation with females and a “relaxed” dominance hierarchy; (b) physiological measures suggesting less stress among low-ranking males; (c) models explaining transmission of this culture; and (d) data testing these models, centered around treatment of transfer males by resident females.

Peace Lessons from an Unlikely Source

Did I grow up in a land of sissies? Perhaps, but I am not mentioning this to decide whether violence in the media and our ability to grow immune to it—as I also have over the years—is desirable, or not. I simply wish to draw attention to the cultural fissures in how violence is portrayed, how we teach conflict resolution, and whether harmony is valued over competitiveness. This is the problem with the human species. Somewhere in all of this resides a human nature, but it is molded and stretched into so many different directions that it is hard to say if we are naturally competitive or naturally community-builders.

Entry: 2025-09-13 00:08:13.610325+02 Charlie Kirk and the Groypers by Dan Lyke comments 0

There are sub-categories of radical right wing nationalist that I am currently unfamiliar with, but I'm making note of this Bluesky thread about the "Groyper Army" and the feud between Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk.

Wikipedia page on Groypers.

Institute for Strategic Dialog: A ‘Groyper War’ struggles to exert influence but paves the way for other bad actors

Diggit Magazine: Charlie Kirk's Culture War, Groypers, Nickers and Q&A- trolling

Since mid-October, Charlie Kirk’s Culture War tour has been increasingly haunted by the Groyper Q&A-trolls, who use the Q&A section to frame Kirk as a cuck.

Edit: Vanity Fair: Groypers, Helldivers 2, Furries: What Do the Messages Left by Charlie Kirk’s Alleged Killer Actually Mean? (Via).

[ related topics: Star Trek History Sociology California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-09-09 16:55:09.156273+02 culture vs scene by Dan Lyke comments 0

Oh, I like this distinction: clew on Metafilter:

I find this distinction useful: if a group isn’t multigenerational it isn’t a culture, whether main or sub; it’s a scene. Scenes are much more common but they don’t often last long.

Entry: 2025-09-08 18:09:02.085329+02 Bay Area Regional Planner (the game) by Dan Lyke comments 0

OMG, I can't believe I missed the Kickstarter for this! We may have to pick up a copy to play with our neighbors... Bay Area Regional Planner (the game)

Discovered via Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈 ‪@josephpolitano.bsky.social‬ who posted a picture of the rules highlighting:

You can't upzone any squares in Marin

Bonus, this thread about the Highway 37 widening which contains this pull quote:

In testimony to the state Assembvly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, Marin County Supervisor and MTC Vice Chair Stephanie Moulton-Peters noted that two members of her staff who commute to San Rafael from Solano County lose up to 90 minutes a day to congestion. "This bill is urgent," said Moulton-Peters. "We've been working on this project for more than a decade... We shouldn't let another generation sit in traffic or let wetland restoration opportunities slip away."

(Emphasis in Robert Prinz's screen cap) I mean, ya could build some damned housing and work towards wetland restoration, but, no, you've gotta increase VMT and fuck the climate instead...

Entry: 2025-08-28 20:25:03.222653+02 Newsom really is running for Trump's by Dan Lyke comments 0

Newsom really is running for Trump's position... https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/08...-on-existing-successful-efforts/

[ related topics: Invention and Design California Culture Sports ]

Entry: 2025-08-27 23:09:15.876067+02 "acute drug toxicity" by Dan Lyke comments 0

Human Rights Data Analysis Group — Millions of Pages of Police Use-of-Force Files Available through New Searchable Database

HRDAG was part of a coalition behind the recently-launched Police Records Access Project. The new searchable database includes millions of pages of documents about tens of thousands of police use-of-force and misconduct cases. The database includes documents related to three types of law enforcement incidents in California: instances in which a police weapon was discharged, instances where officers used force that resulted in serious injury or death, and instances in which an agency determined an officer violated certain department rules (like lying or sexual abuse).

Via HRDAG @hrdag@mastodon.social which notes:

One notable insight from reviewing the database of California police misconduct cases: deaths in the database are often labeled as something like "acute drug toxicity," even when the police were engaging with a civilian during or just before the death.

Entry: 2025-08-27 20:57:34.82991+02 this headline wouldn’t have made any sense by Dan Lyke comments 0

Linking to Rolling Stone: Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to anime gooner AI slop. not because of the article itself, but because Joey deVilla: Not that long ago, this headline wouldn’t have made any sense talks a little bit about the evolution of language.

Entry: 2025-08-27 18:04:49.226212+02 OpenAI will support you and encourage you by Dan Lyke comments 0

BBC: Parents of teenager who took his own life sue OpenAI

The lawsuit was filed by Matt and Maria Raine, parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine, in the Superior Court of California on Tuesday. It is the first legal action accusing OpenAI of wrongful death.

Breaking Down the Lawsuit Against OpenAI Over Teen's Suicide

the complaint (local mirror).

Ernie Smith ‪@ernie.tedium.co‬ observes "The very algorithm that upset people because it was removed in GPT-5 appears to have played a pivotal role in the teen’s death, and discouraged him from outside help." ❀°。Der Siebenschläfer *.ﾟ✿ ⋆ ‪@sababausa.bsky.social‬ has some particular pull quotes.

I'm tempted to just give this one it's own entry, but I'm also kinda putting all of my "LLMs are a horrorshow" links in common entries, and they seem thematically similar today, so:

The Register — AI + ML — One long sentence is all it takes to make LLMs misbehave

You just have to ensure that your prompt uses terrible grammar and is one massive run-on sentence like this one which includes all the information before any full stop which would give the guardrails a chance to kick in before the jailbreak can take effect and guide the model into providing a "toxic" or otherwise verboten response the developers had hoped would be filtered out.

I'm having trouble finding the publication on the Palo Alto Networks — Unit 42 web site, but there's lots of good interview questions and discussion in that article.

For a giggle: Alexandria Neonakis ‪@beavs.bsky.social‬ has a little video of using Adobe's generative fill

I just wanted to see how bad it really was. perfect, adobe. no notes. great tech.

And: The Dangers Agentic Coding Tools Pose to Open Source, and It Took Many Years And Billions Of Dollars, But Microsoft Finally Invented A Calculator That Is Wrong Sometimes (Via)

Edit: OpenAI admits ChatGPT safeguards fail during extended conversations, via.

Entry: 2025-08-18 18:55:02.667865+02 Charlene and I are exploring various by Dan Lyke comments 0

Charlene and I are exploring various places around the Bay. Yesterday we ended up in Oakland on Broadway around 19th, and were disappointed by the level of street activation on a Sunday afternoon.

When we do another visit, where are the pedestrian throngs at? Where should we hang out?

[ related topics: Bay Area Theater & Plays California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-08-11 18:08:45.453798+02 idiot train to moronsville by Dan Lyke comments 0

I mean, the whole thread, but Peter ‪@notalawyer.bsky.social‬

usually if you ask experts why an empire fell they’ll say it’s nuanced and multifaceted, so i think it’s kind of cool that with America future historians will get to just say like “oh they took the idiot train to moronsville”

But as the thread goes through specifics, like Joel‬ ‪@polyparadigm.bsky.social‬

“They re-directed their natural disaster response teams into the pogrom corps, and removed all age limits, even before anyone had invaded.” ‪ and JoyousPanther‬ ‪@joyouspanther.bsky.social‬

They blew up the weather satellites because they showed climate change was real.

We get past the specifics and into the culture, and I suspect that this is broadly applicable to lots of collapses: Suz from Aotearoa‬ ‪@suezana.bsky.social‬

I think the people who are not in the USA have a totally different idea for why it will collapse.

Mine are racism, Sexism, hate of others, religous intolerance , USA exceptionalism, greed & lust. But mostly massive overspending on military & reliance on bullying others through military means."

Entry: 2025-08-06 19:30:28.266237+02 A few musings on GenAI, technology, and the value of craft by Dan Lyke comments 0

A bunch of disconnected feelings that seem relevant to each other:

Some time around the fall of the Soviet Union, my parents made a trip to Czechoslovakia, when it was called that. They stopped at the Moser Glassworks, and report that their guide told the story of some Soviet muckety muck coming and visiting and observing that in Russia they had the same thing, but better, in plastic.

And I'm sure some of this is a story to appeal to the USAnian prejudices of the time, but...

Last night I listened to Switched On Pop episode 428 — Is that new song you like AI? Here’s how you can tell. It was fascinating to hear how, yeah, if I listened to these things as background music, or heard stuff on while I was out shopping, I may or may not take note. And it's even got me thinking about square dance calling; the background is often just a beat and enough something to make it not super annoyingly repetitive, does it matter what it is?

Charlene forwards me various clips from [Wherever's] Got Talent or The Voice, and some of those performers grab me so hard, I've bought a few albums (Chapel Hart, most recently Linkin' Bridge come to mind), but it's telling on the culture and on how we listen to music how many of those performers show up, blow away the audience, and then a few years later have faded out of the culture.

When I worked on the Cricut product family, especially after my friends who cashed out on that, there was much discussion about riding the balance between turnkey inspiration, and the users of the product feeling like they were doing something, making choices, being creative in some way. It was important that the product enable a feeling of interaction and choices without being too difficult to accomplish.

Since then, I've seen the evolution of craft, thinking particularly about 3d printing, and how that's morphed into laser cutters and UV printers. Seems like there were an awful lot of people downloading models and futzing with their printer's settings until they got something that wasn't a pile of filament spaghetti, but now so many of those machines are gathering dust.

Somewhere along that line, I was working on some product development, and one of the people mentioned that they were waiting on CNC router time to come up on the schedule in the shop they were working with. I went out to my track saw and nailed out a couple of prototype refinements in a few hours, and eventually that product was injection molded in China.

Last Friday night, I got together with someone I met through a local singing circle, and we sat down at his piano and played with music, and... hot damn there's something awesome about participatory musical play.

This leads me to pondering two notions:

First, that the reliance on computers to dissociate ourselves from the knowledge of the details of the craft makes us dependent in ways that impact our ability to actually be creative. There's a line in one of the Dave Gingery books about building your own machine shop from scratch that this isn't about post-apocalyptic recovery, these are the basic skills you need to have if you're going to work in metalworking, so it's not outlandish to be able to cast your own lathe parts.

Second, that there's something in the relationships we form with people that's important in carrying forward the knowledge that we need to remain skilled in craft. The value of musical stardom is now occurring in the parasocial relationships with megastars, and in that we no longer value the craft as much as we value the media scale that creates megastars. If music is just background, then, yeah, it doesn't matter if it's generated by AI. If we engage with it as personality, then there's room for creativity by a few. But if we participate in it, there's something deeper and richer that really enhances our community.

As I look at how I use computers, and where I want my career building things with computers that other people use to go (damn, that's a clumsy phrase, but I'm not gonna use GenAI to blandify it), I want to be building products that encourage participatory engagement, and that back off on the power law a little bit, and help us become more social than parasocial.

Entry: 2025-08-06 01:16:57.606357+02 Oceangate Titan report by Dan Lyke comments 0

Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation releases report on Titan submersible

The board determined the primary contributing factors were OceanGate’s inadequate design, certification, maintenance and inspection process for the Titan. Other factors cited in the report include a toxic workplace culture at OceanGate, an inadequate domestic and international regulatory framework for submersible operations and vessels of novel design, and an ineffective whistleblower process under the Seaman’s Protection Act.

The board also found OceanGate failed to properly investigate and address known hull anomalies following its 2022 Titanic expedition. Investigators determined the Titan’s real-time monitoring system generated data that should have been analyzed and acted on during the 2022 Titanic expedition. However, OceanGate did not take any action related to the data, conduct any preventative maintenance or properly store the Titan during the extended off season before its 2023 Titanic expedition.

The actual 300 page PDF.

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social

public response to the investigation: "oceangate spent all this R&D time and money to come up with this really fancy alerting system for detecting hull fractures, and when it alerted them to hull fractures they ignored the alert and kept operating regardless? what was the point of building it if they were just going to ignore the alerts? who even does that?"

me: *THOUSAND YARD STARE*

Entry: 2025-08-04 19:20:00.427071+02 Movies of late by Dan Lyke comments 0

Noting a couple of movies we've seen over the past month:

The Persian Version — pitched as a comedy, it had some moments, but mostly it was more a good "someone telling a personal story about their cultural background" intergenerational trauma and reconciliation/daughter comes to understand her mother movie.

Thunder Soul — A Reddit post that I can't find right now described this as something like "Mr Holland's Opus but real", it perhaps had a bit more reminiscence than music, but follows a bunch of former students of music teacher Conrad O. Johnson in the Kashmere High School stage band as they put together a reunion of the band to honor the teacher. Warning, rental of this film may lead directly to buying something like the Texas Thunder Soul 1968-1974 album from Now-Again music (which I haven't yet listened to, but I did buy).

The music is rousing (could use more of it), the critique and celebration of an educator and the culture and administration he worked in is worthwhile (albeit a little light), I really want to now see a documentary on some of the students who put this whole thing back together, and how they got to where they were. This one left us wanting more on pretty much all of the fronts that it tackled.

The Cuban — we were looking for something to wind down with last night, looked for a movie tagged music, and I wouldn't call this a musical film, but Louis Gossett Jr. turns in a fantastic performance as a dementia patient in a nursing home, against Ana Golja as the very compelling 19 year old caretaker and daughter of an Afghan immigrant who goes above and beyond to reach him. Don't think too hard about some of the setting/medical issues, it's a neat look at Afghan immigrant culture meets Toronto meets Cuba, with some fun music, but it's not a story about the music. Though Golja does have a voice which really supports the music that there is.

Entry: 2025-08-02 17:05:02.860454+02 Driving to the South Bay today so by Dan Lyke comments 0

Driving to the South Bay today, so loading up the podcasts, and Googled to decide whether to listen to an interview about https://swyftcities.com/ .

PRT with cable cars. Uh. I love the '70s meets steampunk vibe, buuuuuut...

[ related topics: California Culture Public Transportation ]

Entry: 2025-07-31 18:34:31.918895+02 CDPH and raw milk by Dan Lyke comments 0

I grew up on raw milk, and among various aspects of my growing up that I've been slow to adapt to and say "whoah, that was sketch", it's one of them. I don't like the flavor of pasteurized milk, and though I'll use it for baking don't generally consume it. Which, you know, is probably fine, as I look around at the ways that pastured herds in my area pollute streams I'm struggling generally with the ethics of the environmental impacts of cheese and meat consumption (even as, yeah, I really like cheese and meat).

Anyway, Ars Technica has a report on how the California Department of Public Health dropped the ball on a bunch of illnesses stemming from products sold by Raw Farm LLC.

San Diego County: Health Officials Investigating Outbreak Linked to Raw Milk

Orange County Health Care Agency: Salmonella Infections in Orange County Linked to Raw Milk from Raw Farm LLC

CDC: Outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium Infections Linked to Commercially Distributed Raw Milk — California and Four Other States, September 2023–March 2024

Via.

[ related topics: Health Ethics Law California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-07-28 18:55:02.354942+02 Foiled in a perfect score on today's by Dan Lyke comments 0

Foiled in a perfect score on today's Timdl by 62 years in the origin of London's coffee house culture. https://www.timdle.com/daily

[ related topics: Sociology California Culture Real Estate ]

Entry: 2025-07-15 20:04:27.714297+02 this website by Dan Lyke comments 0

Lynnesbæn @lynnesbian@fedi.lynnesbian.space

⚠️ This website uses cookies known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth anomalies, or other reproductive harm.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-07-14 19:18:55.178804+02 Impersonating police by Dan Lyke comments 0

We've got ex-military wackos impersonating cops: Bay Area military veteran arrested for posing as cop, bounty hunter: Sheriff

Gregg Jackson, 40, from Santa Rosa, California, was arrested earlier this week for impersonating a law enforcement officer, specifically "using a vehicle outfitted with red and blue emergency lights and was identifying himself as a bounty hunter," the sheriff's office announced on Tuesday.

Police officers impersonating cops: Former Rohnert Park Police Officer Joseph Huffaker Found Guilty Of Conspiracy To Commit Extortion, Impersonating ATF Agent, And Other Charges Related To Marijuana Seizure Scheme (one of his co-conspirators, Brendan “Jacy” Tatum, pled guilty back in 2021, the defense was that the whole damned department was corrupt and they got thrown under the bus, which... I could believe.)

The Sonoma Sheriff's Instagram account

We’ve received reports of scammers impersonating Sheriff’s Office sergeants, claiming you missed a court date or jury duty that you were notified of via certified mail — and demanding payment or personal info to clear it up.

These calls are not real.

No one from our office will call to ask for money, gift cards, or cryptocurrency over the phone.

Hard to tell who's law enforcement and who isn't, any more...

Entry: 2025-07-09 17:11:26.484444+02 How it feels by Dan Lyke comments 0

Stolen from mad scientist rizz🔞🎨 ‪@labfreaker.bsky.social‬

a stylized blue ocean, pictures of brightly colored sea life underneath, a smiling dolphin leaping above breaking surf, with a rainbow, hot air balloons, and contrails forming hearts overhead, captioned 'How it feels to have friends hwo are perverts'

[ related topics: Photography California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-06-25 20:16:54.317112+02 Vehicular Homicide, & no license suspension by Dan Lyke comments 0

They were convicted of killing with their cars. No one told the California DMV

A CalMatters investigation found that courts didn’t report hundreds of vehicular manslaughter convictions to the state, prompting officials to belatedly take many drivers’ licenses.

Via CalMatters Bluesky post and Petaluma Argus-Courier's article (I suspect you need a subscription for that one).

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-06-25 19:43:15.628768+02 Trust nothing any more by Dan Lyke comments 0

One of the projects for work is building a startup research tool demo on our platform, and in the process of that I asked gpt-4o-mini for details about one of the unicorns that bought a billboard mentioned in Bay Area Current: San Francisco's Billboards Aren't For You, and if I'd started this search from just Googling on various terms, I think I would have come to the conclusion that this company is a pile of hot air, but that those involved are real.

On the basis of the LLM output, initials rather than names for many of the key players, lots of titles that are just ... off ..., I'm now wondering if much of the backstory of this startup isn't LLM generated.

Entry: 2025-06-23 20:20:02.889236+02 Thinking about low poly count driving by Dan Lyke comments 0

Thinking about low poly count driving games that involved terrorizing a fictional San Francisco (the "Rush" franchise, Crazy Taxi, etc) and wondering if we can draw any lines to current the horrors that the automated speed ticketing traffic cameras are revealing.

Entry: 2025-06-22 15:42:16.560477+02 The Beaverton on US travel by Dan Lyke comments 0

The Beaverton: Canadians travelling to the US advised to not fucking do that

“Canadians are welcome in California. It’s perfectly safe to visit,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “Just so long as you take a few basic travel precautions, like travelling on a valid passport, teleporting over the border, moving undetected in the shadows in the dead of night, getting the telephone number of an immigration attorney tattooed to your upper thigh, saying a heartfelt goodbye to your pets and the people who love you, and appointing someone to water your plants just in case you disappear into a labyrinthian nightmare of an extrajudicial immigration enforcement system that no longer answers to judge nor common mercy.”

Via

Entry: 2025-06-13 00:12:22.224842+02 Padilla on the invasion of California by Dan Lyke comments 0

Nikki McCann Ramírez @nikkimcr.bsky.social‬

Padilla: If this is how DHS responds to a senator with a question you can only imagine what they're doing to farm workers, to cooks, to day laborers out in the Los Angeles community and throughout California.

(With video)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture Community Video ]

Entry: 2025-06-12 22:07:58.744916+02 Civil War news OTD by Dan Lyke comments 0

The clusterfuck invasion of California as of right now:

Guard Soldiers Deployed in Trump's LA Crackdown Aren't Getting Paid Yet. (Via

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs contradicts Trump’s takes on Putin, LA protests (Via)

‪Justin Baragona‬ ‪@justinbaragona.bsky.social‬

Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city."

Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!

(With video)

Video of the assault on Padilla.

Aaron Rupar ‪@atrupar.com‬

holy shit -- GOP Rep. Mike Turner tries to "help out" Hegseth by getting him to confirm that the Pentagon does not in fact have plans to take Greenland by force, but Hegseth instead more or less testifies that yep, they have devised plans for that

[ related topics: Current Events California Culture Video ]

Entry: 2025-06-11 20:47:55.685201+02 Episcopal Bishops weigh in on ICE invasion by Dan Lyke comments 0

Because I'm going to want to find this later: A Letter from the Episcopal Bishops in the State of California

Like all Californians, we are watching with great concern the events unfolding around immigration protests in Los Angeles. We are deeply concerned about the ICE raids and about the potential for violence arising from the deployment of National Guard troops and Marines to the Los Angeles area. We are concerned that military deployments will escalate the confrontations unnecessarily, and worry that all of our regions in California may be subject to future deployments that heighten tensions rather than resolving them.

[ related topics: California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-06-11 00:53:43.212671+02 Marines had to park in Orange County by Dan Lyke comments 0

AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org

Hmm, parking in downtown LA *is* really bad, the Marines had to park in Seal Beach (Orange County). If they want a better route to the Civic Center, I'd hop on Amtrak and hop off at LA Union Station. (it's a lot better).

Marines ordered by Trump to serve in Los Angeles arrive in ... Orange County?

Thomas Sturm @tsturm@famichiki.jp

@ai6yr "LA cant be occupied by armed forces as there is no parking." is the most California take possible.

😂

Entry: 2025-06-08 06:55:02.885976+02 When the LAPD thanks the protest by Dan Lyke comments 0

When the LAPD thanks the protest organizers. We need to get ICE the fuck out of California.

[ related topics: Photography Civil Liberties California Culture ]

Entry: 2025-06-08 06:26:28.119563+02 From FinTech to Fin Tech by Dan Lyke comments 0

Adrianna Tan @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io

If you missed my ‘From FinTech to Fin Tech’ talk at North Bay Python, here’s a blog post with the video

The slide everyone was talking about is at 06:27

https://popagandhi.com/posts/my-talk-at-north-bay-python/

Entry: 2025-06-01 23:38:48.473857+02 The Italian Job, Blues Brothers, and eternal vigilance by Dan Lyke comments 0

This is marvelous: The West Australian — Andrew Miller: Classic car chases educate a child’s mind in ways the classroom just can’t

I was supposed to be helping the six-year-old with reading practice, but we got distracted and ended up watching classic car chases on YouTube.

Specifically, comparing and contrasting wanton automotive carnage in the movies The Italian Job and The Blues Brothers.

This naturally led to explaining the historical relevance of the Illinois Nazis — who met their demise by driving off an incomplete flyover while pursuing Jake and Elwood Blues — and why popular culture so often circles back to the dark risks of fascism.

Via

[ related topics: Movies Sociology Heinlein Beer California Culture Automobiles ]

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