Tuesday September 28th, 2021
A long-time friend came out to me recently. This should not have knocked me for the loop it did. I know plenty of people all across various axes of the sexuality and gender spectrum. And yet, as I was processing that many of the identifiers by which I knew this person had suddenly shifted, I was off-balance.
There's a lot I'm still processing about that. I went back and found something I'd written back in the '90s about coming out, and realized that all sorts of my life is standing in the way of me feeling like my authentic fulfilled self, and the obstacle to that is, more than any social context, my own hang-ups and fears. Of course.
Anyway, this is a fantastic read on a history that it's easy to forget. On my nightstand is Lorna N. Bracewell's "Why We Lost the Sex Wars", and though it seems like there's been stagnation in a lot of social movements since the '90s, a hell of a lot happened in the decades preceding that.
And though the author doesn't make the connection explicit, just a few sentences about the anti-pornography statutes in Minneapolis way back when have now made a connection to current events in Texas that I cannot unsee.
Glad I took the time to read this evening.
A History of Leather at Pride: 1965-1995
Via MeFi, in which the author has chimed in.
Monday September 27th, 2021
Why, yes, I did just copy the text from an Apple documentation page into a text buffer, so I could freakin' read it. Geez, not everybody has a 47' high monitor, and wants six and a half inches between lines, dudes!
What is Dan up to?
Sunday September 26th, 2021
The US intelligence community attempts to rehabilitate the image of Julian Assange: Kidnapping, assassination and a London shoot-out: Inside the CIA's secret war plans against WikiLeaks
Saturday September 25th, 2021
Cooking for one tonight: a crude gazpacho made with tomatoes and cucumbers from a neighbor, collards from my voice teacher, and a little sole topped with a medley of olives.
This is really good: My Lover’s Girlfriend Asked Him To Dump Me. Here’s What I Learned When He Did.
Friday September 24th, 2021
If the performance of the new XCode is any indication, those new Apple M1x chips must be screamingly fast.
Wonder how long it's gonna be before Monoprice and Amazon Basics start doing laptops...
JAMA Psychiatry: Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder — A Randomized Clinical Trial doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.3285
Conclusions and Relevance Findings suggest that psilocybin with therapy is efficacious in treating MDD, thus extending the results of previous studies of this intervention in patients with cancer and depression and of a nonrandomized study in patients with treatment-resistant depression.
Science: Evidence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum DOI: 10.1126/science.abg7586
... Here, we present evidence from excavated surfaces in White Sands National Park (New Mexico, United States), where multiple in situ human footprints are stratigraphically constrained and bracketed by seed layers that yield calibrated radiocarbon ages between ~23 and 21 thousand years ago. These findings confirm the presence of humans in North America during the Last Glacial Maximum, adding evidence to the antiquity of human colonization of the Americas and providing a temporal range extension for the coexistence of early inhabitants and Pleistocene megafauna.
Thursday September 23rd, 2021
Part of the project I've been working on is looking at, conceptually, how we navigate our virtual spaces and track our data. This is a fascinating look at how the next generation doesn't see folders, and why my complaints about the way that the Mac Finder and other filesystem navigation things deliberately abstracting and confusing the directory structure might just be adaptation to how "kids these days" use computers: FILE NOT FOUND: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
I am deep in trying to understand why Google Finance doesn't work in a WKWebView, and holy shit did we make a mistake by letting people think that JavaScript was a way to handle clicks on links...
Federal court indicts ex-Rohnert Park officers for extortion>a?
The indictment filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco Tuesday accuses former Sgt. Brendan Jacy Tatum and former Officer Joseph Huffaker of extortion under color of law and conspiracy to commit extortion under color of law. Tatum was also accused of tax evasion and falsifying records in the federal investigation.
Petaluma Know Before You Grow forum on Transit Oriented Development, with Doug Farr, author of Sustainable Nation, and Monica Meagher, Sustainability Project Manager at BART. What else are you gonna watch, binge Ted Lasso again? https://youtu.be/QU3ZNL3qh2E
Just facilitated a Zoom discussion with Doug Farr, author of Sustainable Nation, and Monica Meagher, Sustainability Project Manager at BART. Both were great, and I'm ordering Doug's book as soon as Copperfield's opens tomorrow.
Holy shit. Is this our tax dollars being spent to kill pedestrians and trash the planet, or is it industry funding?
OH: "That operation should be so solid that it flows effortlessly."
Wednesday September 22nd, 2021
Seeing this "Democrats, name one Republican you'd vote for" meme, and uh uh: I rarely vote *for* anyone, I vote against the other candidate. Aside from primaries, most of my votes "for" are a "hold my nose and compromise" situation.
Tuesday September 21st, 2021
Holy fuck does this look like a bad idea: "Try the CryptoTab Browser. It works like a regular web browser but mines Bitcoin for you while you browse! Works on all devices." Found on /.
“I need help,” London wrote in an Aug. 22 email to the county commissioners, which Michigan Advance received today after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Kent County Board of Commissioners last week. “My team and I are broken. I’m about done. I’ve done my job to the best of my ability. I’ve given just about everything to Kent County, and now I’ve given some more of my safety.”
Reddit comment from someone who says that they work for his office, expressing displeasure with the lack of support from the County Supervisors.
It’s Not Wrong that "🤦🏼♂️".length == 7
But It’s Better that "🤦🏼♂️".len() == 17 and Rather Useless that len("🤦🏼♂️") == 5
From time to time, someone shows that in JavaScript the .length of a string containing an emoji results in a number greater than 1 (typically 2) and then proceeds to the conclusion that haha JavaScript is so broken—and is rewarded with many likes. In this post, I will try to convince you that ridiculing JavaScript for this is less insightful than it first appears and that Swift’s approach to string length isn’t unambiguously the best one. Python 3’s approach is unambiguously the worst one, though.
Shadow forwarded this one along, and... I've got a friend who bike commutes from western Sonoma County (I think he's currently in Forestville, used to be much further out) into Santa Rosa, and he's constantly posting pictures like this. We really have ceded public space to cars.
RT Eλf Sternberg @elfsternberg
Irony! Anti-smoking drug causes cancer:
"911 Hazmat Cleanup"? Maybe I won't wash and reuse that fabric facemask that was in the sidewalk there...
RT golden phantom (50(1 + sqrt(5))/100) @realjdburn
the trolley 𝘰𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘳𝘵𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺
Monday September 20th, 2021
I had read summaries of this that I thought were satirizing the original, but no: John Nolte of Breitbart: Howard Stern Proves Democrats Want Unvaccinated Trump Voters Dead
Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the coronavirus? Because leftists like Stern and CNNLOL and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated.
Nothing else makes sense to me.
In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?
If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!
It goes on, but the "now look what you made me do" is pretty astounding here.
Great reads on how the US military fucked up in Afghanistan: The Other Afghan Women. How the U.S. Created the Afghan War—and Then Lost It
Related: Britain's dirty secret, how, post WWII in Greece, Britain armed the Nazi sympathizers to kill partisans who also happened to self-describe as Communists, and how that's led to the far right revival in Greece today.
Sunday September 19th, 2021
Even more bubbles
More Bubbles
Bubbles
Why do I love this town? Sitting beside the River House listening to the band across the Turning Basin while waiting for Charlene's Amtrak bus to arrive at the transit center.
Shout-out to the kid screaming "how do you stop?" in the group skateboarding down the hill in front of our house. #doingitright
Tony Parkes did an *amazing* presentation on the history of square dancing, from the European court and country dances through the African and American Black slave influences, to Henry Ford, all the way through to now, in this morning's Newbie Callers chat. Fascinating and really well done, and in the discussion afterwards there was even touching on the story of how square dancing was introduced to Australia.
Newbie Callers 2021-09-18: Tony Parkes on the history of square dancing