1. Gormenghast (2000) — 8/10
2. The Leftovers S01 (2014) — 8/10
3. Space Force S02 (2022) — 7/10
4. Aziz Ansari: Nightclub Comedian (2022) — 9/10
5. Taylor Tomlinson: Look at You (2022) — 9/10
6. Jim Gaffigan: Comedy Monster (2022) — 7/10
7. Ali Wong: Don Wong (2022) — 4/10
8. The Dark Tower (2017) — 8/10
9. Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker (2019) — 5/10
10. The Great Wall (2016) — 5/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews... [More]

For years, programmers have been searching for the one, true, perfect font for code. They keep making changes and coming up with dozens, if not hundreds of new fonts. Most of these are fixed-size, but some are proportional. Some have extra ligatures for common combinations, like ≠or ≥. Some look cursive, which I suppose is a matter of taste.

I saw one recently in a video presentation that seems like a big step backwards.

What is the point of making parentheses look so similar to square... [More]

Earlier this year, seemingly inside of a day, the normally deadlocked U.S. government approved an $800B+ budget for the U.S. military. That’s the base price, not including money for actual wars and not including “black budgets” for spy agencies.

The Congress even threw in more than the Pentagon had asked for, just for shits and giggles.[1]

A few weeks ago, the ruling classes of the United States decided to spend an additional $40B on the Ukraine conflict, over ¾ of it for weapons and military... [More]

1. Townies S01 (1996) — 7/10
2. Rick & Morty S05 (2021) — 10/10
3. Upload S01 (2020) — 8/10
4. Titane (2021) — 5/10
5. Die Käserei in Goldingen (2008) — 7/10
6. The Revenant (2015) — 9/10
7. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) — 9/10
8. After Life S03 (2022) — 6/10
9. The Brothers Grimsby (2016) — 4/10
10. The Great Gatsby (2013) — 7/10

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Standard disclaimer[1]

This is the last of three novels in the MaddAddam trilogy. It picks up where the first two books left off: the rescue of Jimmy and Amanda from the clutches of the two Painballers. Ren and Toby lead everyone home, back to the compound where they’ve set up camp with the Crakers. Soon, they are joined by Zeb, who takes up with Toby, despite her misgivings that he will take up with the slutty Swift Fox.

Despite the high level of education for most of the members of this last... [More]

The video Intentionally knocking over water to impress friends shows a group of tween or teen girls assaulting a mascot at a theme park by dousing them with water. A friend sent it to me in a group chat. I wrote back:

I would have to work much harder than I’m willing to do right now to express my disdain for nearly everyone in that video. Those girls with their stupid phones in the air, each starring in their own movie, are just older versions of the 8- or 9-year-old kid I saw on the train... [More]

The cartoon We Come in Peace by Ted Rall writes,

“After mass shootings, liberal opponents of gun rights love to say that violence is never the answer. But their messaging on war, violence, militarism, even assassinations, sends a completely different message about their hypocrisy.”

This one got me thinking that America’s refusal to pass gun-control/background-check measures to stem the violence is one place where we’re not hypocritical! We are the world’s largest arms merchant, flooding one... [More]

I sent the following quote to a friend:

We seem to be doomed to ride a pendulum of

1. Build a useful societal benefit (USB)
2. Have the USB be coopted by vultures and con-men
3. Organize regulation to prevent abuse of the USB
4. Have the USB get mired in regulation and become less obviously useful—because things get complex, especially with pressures from con-men that cause a constant papering over of holes in the regulations until they’re so large and complex that no-one understands them except for a cottage industry of experts that has... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Programming... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

The less useful the media is for finding out the truth, the less likely it is to be censored.

I noticed that Trevor Noah gave the White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech this year. I only watched a minute of it, the portion that had been posted somewhere to demonstrate how amazing his support of journalism was. He spoke of how tough it was for journalists in Ukraine or Russia, where they are being persecuted and hounded for publishing unpleasant truths. This is unlike the States where you... [More]

I’m consulting on a private project with a couple of friends. They use Discord for communication. It’s quite a nice app, but there is no app in the MacOS app store. When I search for it, Apple shows me the following, wildly irrelevant hits.

Discord in App Store

You could also just say that you didn’t find any hits, Apple. This isn’t even close. The top hit is a 1/5-star reviewed product, with one review. What is the point of ever even showing this product to anyone who didn’t search for it?

So I installed the... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

The following is a collection of essays, notes, and ideas I’ve written over the last several weeks, all loosely associated with the war in Ukraine. I’ve tried to edit the notes into some coherence, especially since some have been chronologically superseded, but I’m neither a journalist nor a scholar, so YMMV. I don’t even necessarily stand behind everything here—some of it is or was just food for thought. The lower you go, the older the notes. The title refers to one of the essays, which... [More]

I was listening to this video,

COVID decreased life expectancy by 2 years. What does that mean? by Sabine Hossfelder (YouTube)

Sabine said that the standard measure of life expectancy “is easy to misunderstand”. So, instead of expecting that people should make an effort to understand it, we dumb it down instead, making it easier to understand, but much less accurate. That is, people will get a less-accurate impression, but be just as confident in it. It will become the new reality, as usual.

Hossfelder talks about the Period life expectancy, which is a measure that assumes that every... [More]

If we can agree that calling Stephen Pinker right-wing is factually if not wildly incorrect, then are we not also intellectually obliged—in some part, at least—to look more carefully into other accusations of right-wing association or white-supremacy made by the same crowd?

That their accusations are wrong in the case with which we are familiar should make us suspicious that their other accusations might also be incorrect or exaggerated—and that they are perhaps motivated to do so for... [More]

YouTube doesn’t actually remove videos from your lists. I suppose that makes them better than truly totalitarian systems, which would make a greater effort to erase knowledge. Instead, when a video is unavailable, YouTube automatically hides it from you, removing its pesky presence from your lists, replacing these videos with a subtle notification at the top of the list.

Unavailable Videos In Watchlist
If you’ve got more than a couple of dozen videos in a list, then you’ve probably scrolled down far enough in the list that... [More]

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

The article ‘What-aboutism’ and the Universal by Chris Horner (3 Quarks Daily) provides an example of an atrocity—the bombing of a school—that people would see the need to tell the world their opinion about. He writes of the hypothetical commentator,

“It is a war crime and you name it as such[,] as an evil, criminal thing. Soon after the words leave your mouth, or get posted online, someone responds with something along these lines: yes, that’s all very well, but why just condemn that? What about..? They then name... [More]”

I thought this was a nice way to express disagreement,

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

This quote has quote a storied history, as documented in The Biggest Problem in Communication Is the Illusion That It Has Taken Place (Quote Investigator). Alternatives are,

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

“The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”

“The most serious danger in communication is the illusion of having achieved it.”

“The... [More]”

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism... [More]

Another game that rides on the coattails of Wordle a bit is a game called Worldle. Just like Wordle, you get six guesses. Unlike Wordle, it shows you a country or a territory somewhere on the planet and then tells you how far off you are as well as the direction in which you should go to find the real territory or country. Sometimes, it throws a real curveball, like Christmas Island or French Southern Territories.

Almost all of the “hole-in-ones” are due to my partner, who’s just amazing at... [More]