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Published by marco on
Yesterday[1] Luke asked me to have lunch with him, which I almost never eat upstairs because I prefer the lake but the weather was not great and I haven’t chatted with him in a while and kind of missed him so we had lunch and were joined by Jack and this new embedded SW engineer Karl so, once they sat down and Karl’s German not being so solid yet and his Swiss German being nonexistent and with Jack smiling to himself as he eavesdropped on our conversation, we switched to English and I’m just... [More]
Published by marco on
I very much enjoy the podcast TrueAnon, hosted by Brace Belden, Liz Frantzak, and produced by Yung Chomsky. They do very high-quality research, have an encyclopedic knowledge of trends, sports, history, culture, and politics, and are funny as hell. I’ve been listening to them for years. I very much enjoyed their last few shows of the year.
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The short Crutches by Amy X. Wang (The Baffler) was surprisingly good. There is no good way to cite it to give you a flavor of it. It is unique. It is raw. It is unflinching. It is kind of about love. There are dogs in it. There are misunderstood and psychotic friends. There is devotion. It’s weird but good.
“At the animal shelter I said, Give me the worst dog available, which turned out to be an oafish, fecal-brown Vizsla missing a back leg. But of course B doted on him. She found endless excuses to come over. She took a... [More]”
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The post A pronounced issue by the-mothermayhem (Reddit) is a Reddit repost of a Tumblr “essay” that describes the painful fallout of having taught an entire generation without phonetics, with only the “whole language” approach, which—checks notes—involves a whole lot of wild guessing because you have no tools with which to analyze—in the strictest sense of the word: i.e., “break down”, or “parse” in the case of sentences, words, and phonemes—unfamiliar words.
The title is play on the once-popular Bushism (Wikipedia): “Is our... [More]
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Saying “I want to make content every day” is shorthand for “I am remunerated for obtaining and holding attention, so I have to generate it. Content is a means to that end.”
I think very few people enjoy what they’re doing once they get on that treadmill. There’s one guy whose first couple of videos about “1 day in Germany vs. 10 years in Germany” were funny. He’s now produced dozens of them—the algorithm is diligent in surfacing them for me—and I’ve long since stopped watching them, though... [More]
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This is also neat. I looked up “der Gruppe” vs. “die Gruppe” and learned that, while some people think they’re interchangeable, others think that they mean subtly different things.
Grammatik: …in die Gruppe… oder …in der Gruppe… ? (Narkive)
“
ist es weniger klar als “in die Gruppe”. Denn die reine Ortsangabe kann auch bedeuten, daß er innerhalb der Gruppe in etwas Kleineres integriert ist.
““Ich habe mich in der Stadt eingelebt” ist schon erfüllt, wenn ich mich in meiner Wohnung wohl fühle.... [More]”
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The article Lean Prinzip (LinkedIn) is in German and discusses how the need for speed endangers innovation. It is written very much from a “leave me alone to be brilliant” style of engineering that argues that innovation can only happen if the engineers are allowed to ignore prosaic concerns like profitability. Something good will come of their work, trust them. It disparages the notion of “efficiency” espoused by managerial layers. It’s not necessarily wrong but it’s also not really interested in a... [More]
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C-suite reading stuffI had the dubious pleasure of reading through MASTERING R&D COMPETITIVENESS IN 2030+ by Lea Thomas Smith, Denis Trost, Moritz Krogmann, Janina Pohl, Felix Prem (3dSE Management Consultants), which is a document about how to chart the roiling waters of the business climate of 2025. The following are some stream-of-consciousness notes I took while reading through it.
The presentation is fast out of the gate: The executive summary screams at you to PANIC because YOU ARE MISSING OUT.
No. Stop doing that. FOMO is be resisted and coolly evaluated. You only need to “rethink... [More]”
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A while back, I spotted the follow cross-post Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks by Azra Raza (3 Quarks Daily). The screenshot below shows what this article looked like. This is an article that the main editor of 3QuarksDaily felt a burning interest to share. Before him, though, Maureen Dowd of the vaunted gray lady, The New York Times, felt a burning desire to shared with the world just how hard it is to be George Clooney.
Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks
This is, of course, mind-boggling if you’re not part of this world.
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Amid all of the snark in this article Did you even notice 4chan’s gone? by Ryan Broderick & Adam Bumas (Garbage Day), which doesn’t even try to pretend to have an any objectivity about what the author very clearly considers an unsavory place, was at least an admission that 4Chan was,
“[…] a website that, effectively, invented the concept of the internet meme and was one of the last truly anonymous spaces left on the web.”
I never used 4Chan. I didn’t have an account there. I would occasionally see flashes... [More]
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This explanation of an experience that this guy had is a bit overwrought but damn if his enthusiasm isn’t infectious.
Cabel Sasser, Panic − XOXO Festival (2024) by XOXO Festival (YouTube)
Skip forward to about 4:00 for the in-depth analysis of artist Wes Cook’s ouevre. Cabel Sasser is a bit of an acquired taste but his enthusiasm is infectious.
Look at this mural, though. It’s amazing. This was on a wall in the children’s seating area in a McDonald’s in Centralia, Washington. It was painted in 1980. Wes went on to do a lot of other work, mostly in theme... [More]
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“Chengyu (traditional Chinese: 成語; simplified Chinese: 成语; pinyin: chéngyǔ; trans. “set phrase”) are a type of traditional Chinese idiomatic expressions, most of which consist of four Chinese characters. Chengyu were widely used in Literary Chinese and are still common in written vernacular Chinese writing and in the spoken language today. According to the most stringent definition, there are about 5,000 chengyu in the Chinese language, though some dictionaries list over... [More]”
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I was pleasantly surprised at this 23-minute video even though, as I outline below, I don’t think it went far enough.
Critic Stephanie Lange EXPOSES Disturbing Teen Plastic Surgery Trend by Glenn Greenwald (YouTube)
“I don’t think that fillers, especially, were half as popular, as they are now, if it weren’t for Kylie Jenner. She has had such a huge influence, especially for the younger generation. And people want to look like the Kardashians because they basically epitomize the beauty standard right now. They’ve got the big bum, the tiny waist, the big boobs, the perfect faces that look... [More]”
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A good friend of mine sent this link to me. I hadn’t listened to an interview since Tim Dillon and Alex Jones and Ira Glasser, former head of the ACLU way back in the spring of 2021. I’ve had fun with this friends links before (see Robert Edward Grant: King of Gobbledygook), so I gave it chance. I couldn’t recommend that anyone else listen to these three hours … but YMMV. It has 26M views and almost 500K likes on YouTube. Check out my notes below and decide for yourself.
Joe Rogan Experience #2111 − Katt Williams by Joe Rogan (YouTube)
I’m almost an hour... [More]
Published by marco on
There are just some notes I made for a recent documentation review.
Use “said” when you’re referring back to one or more items that you don’t want to list again. It’s a sort of fancy neutral pronoun to refer to the subject. E.g., say you have the sentence
“The parameters A, B, C, and D are shown to the user; after the user has chosen values for them, the application submits them.”
Here, we’ve used “them” twice, which feels a touch awkward.... [More]
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I was sent this article by my vast network of correspondents: Chicago gangs clash with Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members: ‘Blacks against migrants’ by Michael Lee (FOX News).
Let’s do some fun and quick and pretty easy analysis here.
The title slug is pretty provocative: “GANGS CLASH”.
Did they, though? Clash?
Let’s see what the article has to say! They spent time writing it, so let’s do them the honor of reading it.
Don’t worry, we don’t have to read far.
The very first paragraph writes,
“Venezuelan migrants... [More]”
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The article Bang-and-Whimper by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) from a few months ago outlined the mindless and morally unhinged argument promulgated by people all across the political spectrum in the U.S. and Europe.
“The Woke-Marxist college kids are wailing over the actions of Israel in Gaza — as they will for anyone within their dumb-ass equation of victims-and-oppressors, especially involving brown and white people. It is a brutal operation in Gaza, for sure, but so was the Hamas act-of-war on October 7 that many want to... [More]”
Published by marco on
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the extremely sharp turn he took on October 7th, 2023. See Losing the plot completely on November 1, 2023, Some commentators are still MIA on November 6, 2023, Moar unhinged commentary on November 23, 2023, and Strawman battles: rape is never OK! on December 30, 2023. Just in case you think I’m picking on him, here’s part of his last post of 2023 Inflection Point 2023 by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice).
“[…] the Hamas terrorist attack of October 7th and its ensuing war in Gaza has bubbled up the fundamental differences between a liberal democratic nation... [More]”
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I’ve listened to This is Hell! for at least 20 years. When I worked in Chicago a few times for a client, I tried to get up to Evanston to the bar—Cary’s Lounge—under what is now the studio, but was never able to meet Chuck.
I haven’t listened to it as religiously this year as other years, but started walking with podcasts a lot more this winter and stumbled on the “best of 2023” series they’ve got going. It’s awesome! Their listeners chose really, really good interviews! They cover all of... [More]
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For what felt like the millionth time, I angrily muttered “were” under my breath, as I read someone use “was” for what was clearly a subjunctive intent. Always willing to improve, I looked the damned thing up, to see whether I was shouting into the wind, as I do on so many other topics.
The article Getting in the (Subjunctive) Mood (Merriam Webster) explains quite well what the subjunctive mood is and how to formulate it. But, it does so in a nearly wholly capitulatory fashion to descriptivism over... [More]
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The article The Russel Brand Conspiracy by Tony McKenna (CounterPunch) writes the following about the allegations against Russell Brand,
“The allegations made against him by the Panorama program seem highly credible. They range from sexual harassment to rape. One victim alleged that Brand raped her against a wall of his house. This allegation pertains to 2012. The evidence to support the allegation consists of a text message she sent him telling him following the assault just how frightened she’d been, that ‘no means... [More]”
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I recently read the headline Vacuum suction-mounted wireless TV zip lines off faulty walls to safety by Scharon Harding (Ars Technica). What an incredible crash blossom. The author used one hyphen but more punctuation would have been better.
How about:
Published by marco on
The interview The Great Reorganization of Sexuality and Gender by Hugh Ryan (This is Hell!) is quite an interesting discussion, which ranged over some absolutely terrible characterizations of what the concerns of so-called right-wingers are, as well as seemingly obstinately refusing to acknowledge the modern-day use of the word snowflake, instead clinging to a 19th-century definition, as well as completely misdefining the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and misusing “strawman argument” for good measure. Then he uses the phrase... [More]
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A good friend of mine sent the following video to me, telling me “just lean back, relax, and let it flow over you.” Excellent advice, my friend.
Robert Edward Grant: NEW EVIDENCE! Mysterious Inscriptions & Encodings INSIDE the Pyramids! by Next Level Soul Podcast (YouTube)
The following are some notes and comments I sent to him as I was watching it.
(A) Um, OK. Some interesting stuff, but WHOA. (B) You’re right; just let it flow over you. (C) Terrified that this is how I sound to other people.
“The Great Pyramid is 11/7, which is the base to the height. So 117 and 11.7 squared is 137 and that’s the number of times the... [More]”
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I had the following video in my queue recently,
Why is it overflowing? by Google Chrome Developers: Una Kravets & Adam Argyle (YouTube)
The following is not a comment on the usefulness of the information in these videos, but on the presentation, which I found so distracting as to make me stop watching. If the poster for it has changed, then here’s what it used to look like.
I dunno, it’s just too many colors and too much extra content and … too much stuff before I get to find out the answer to the question posed in the title.
The backgrounds of Una and Adam’s offices look... [More]
Published by marco on
I watched the first round of the semifinals but didn’t take notes. I was inspired to take notes for the second semifinals. It was a dumpster fire.
There were 16 contestants, but I’ve only reviewed fifteen below. Sue me.
Published by marco on
The article Found through Google, bought with Visa and Mastercard: Inside the deepfake porn economy by Kat Tenbarge (NBC News) described something I’d been only vaguely aware of.
“Most deepfake videos are of female celebrities, but creators now also offer to make videos of anyone. A creator offered on Discord to make a 5-minute deepfake of a “personal girl,” meaning anyone with fewer than 2 million Instagram followers, for $65.”
Customized porn of anyone is novel to me. I’d never read it hypothesized in any of the... [More]
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Why This Art Is In Every Hair Salon by Nerdwriter (YouTube)
Near the end, he shows a matrix of Nagel’s artwork, showing 25 skinny white women and then says
“They give the impression of real people—chic, fashionable, independent people—but still leave enough space for you to place yourself in them. For salons, Nagel-women served as aspirational images, though it has to be said that these women, all being of one complexion, it’s likely they were only aspirational for a certain segment of the population. This speaks to the warped priorities of 1980s... [More]”
Published by marco on
Would you like to buy a used Mercedes with 558HP for only CHF130K?
This car was sitting on a tiny, used-car lot near our home. They usually have only 3-5 cars on offer, usually more high-end stuff. This was much, much higher-end than usual, but I’m sure it will be snatched up by some eager young man who needs 558HP to get around town.
Published by marco on
Whenever I think that I can reach anybody with the power of my arguments and evidence, with my sophistry, with my charm ,.. I will now think of this guy.
