jwz: Recent Episodes
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"Good news! Your dispute wasn't reviewed within 30 days, so the claim on your YouTube video has now been released." Bonnie Tyler died last month, and so the glorious "Total Eclipse of the Heart, Literal Version" by Persephone Maewyn and dascottjr was making the rounds again, dodging takedowns. (This video is a textbook case of fair use, since not only is it a parody song, but the lyrics are direct commentary on the video itself, I mean come on.) Anyway all extant copies of it are shit quality, so I reconstructed it from the official HD video plus the "literal" audio, and re-built the subtitles by hand. Immediate takedown. I appealed. A week later, some intern or chatbot at BMG said "fuck you no". Then I tried to do a counter-claim, but they wouldn't let me, because I wouldn't give them a lock of my hair first. Then... 30 days later... they're both up, and all is forgiven I guess?
Mirror them while the mirroring's good.
Hard subs: ▶︎ Soft subs: ▶︎ Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
▶︎In what-is-now-traditional journalistic malpractice, none of the articles about this have a photo or video of the guillotine. But I found one. Salem Brought a Guillotine To Oppose New AI Data Center. Company Reps Left, Feeling "Unsafe".
Someone brought a guillotine to a city council meeting in Salem, Oregon on July 27, 2026. Not a sign shaped like one. Not a drawing. According to community accounts and social media posts, an actual guillotine structure appeared at the protest outside Loucks Auditorium, where hundreds of residents had gathered to oppose a proposed multi-billion-dollar AI data center. Company representatives reportedly assessed the scene and left, citing safety concerns -- though that detail hasn't appeared in formal news coverage or official minutes. [...]
Salem just reminded the industry that community consent isn't a formality you schedule around -- it's a variable that can stall a $5.1 billion project before a single permit clears.
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If you are going to Outside Lands and don't want to install their crappy app, here's a calendar file of the whole schedule. Also, if you are going and we actually know each other in person, lemme know!
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You may have noticed that my various sites were nearly unusable for the last 4+ days, and are still maybe not doing great. The current attack by AI scrapers is somehow of an even more harmful character than previous ones. During the last storm, I was able to weather 80+req/sec. But this time with only 32 req/sec, responsiveness went completely to shit. Possibly because thousands of connections were staying in LAST_ACK? I dunno.
After trying many things, the only thing that alleviated it somewhat was to start blackholing entire countries by /16.
And having done so, I'm... still getting 32/req sec. But now the site is responsive. So there's some thing special about this latest attacker that makes things fall over, that is not merely "hammering you with page loads as fast as you respond". And this was the case even if I fed the scrapers a plain-old Apache 404 or 503, without dropping down into PHP at all.
To whom do I send the invoice for the lost productivity of my staff, who could not access our own web site to do their jobs for most of the week? Asking for an everybody.
Anyway, some things I have been finding helpful this week:
- country-block;
- ipsum = level 3;
- blocklist.de = all.
My approach (which had been working great last week, but not so much this week) was to create separate php-fpm pools for "real" web sites and for scrapers; and a corresponding fcgi proxy for each. The idea here being that under load, the "scraper" responder might become unresponsive, but the "real" site will be fine. And that was working pretty well... last month.
Something like:
<Proxy "unix:/run/php-fpm/jwz.sock|fcgi://php-jwz"> ProxySet </Proxy> ... <Proxy "unix:/run/php-fpm/dadadodo.sock|fcgi://php-dadadodo"> ProxySet timeout=10 </Proxy>
But the fact that under catastrophic load, I couldn't even get the php-fpm status pages to load, despite using a pm.status_listen "invisible pool" to bypass the queue, suggest to me that there's some other shared resource contention I don't know about:
<Location /fpm-status-dadadodo> SetHandler "proxy:unix:/run/php-fpm/dadadodo-status.sock|fcgi://php-dadadodo" Require ip ... </Location>
I also have conflicting experience with whether things are better with a "reasonable" number of Apache workers, or going hog wild on it: ServerLimit 16, MaxRequestWorkers 400 versus ServerLimit 400, MaxRequestWorkers 10000.
In summary: "AI is the future, don't get left behind." Also in this future you can't have a web site.
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Scott Wiener, Ladies and Gentlemen: Wiener employs Anthropic's tech for an interactive attack ad, but all Chan's campaign sees is desperation:
The Wiener campaign was in part inspired to create the chatbot in order to "lean into the AI craze overtaking the city," Arellano added. [...]
Ian Krager, spokesperson for the Chan campaign, told Gazetteer that Wiener is "desperately resorting to gimmicks" because Chan's message to voters has narrowed the gap; recent polling suggests that Chan is within five percentage points of Wiener.
"If there was ever any doubt that Scott Wiener is bought and paid for by Big AI, he's not even trying to hide it anymore," Krager said. "We know Scott Wiener is desperate for attention, but it's never a good idea for a man to put words in a woman's mouth -- especially when they are falsities fraught with racist and sexist undertones."
Krager added that Wiener has "cozied up to Big AI and corporate money," and that "voters deserve better than the tired and trite slop Scott Wiener is offering."
48 Hills: Wiener’s racist, sexist AI chatbot attacks Chan – and it’s weird and stupid and gross.
Update:: Oh no, Wiener had to take down his AI racism-bot. Oh no.
"Scott Wiener can rightly take down his bigotry bot, but he can't erase the concerns it raised among San Franciscans about his character and judgment," said Ian Krager, Chan's spokesperson.
"San Franciscans deserve better than a campaign funded by Big AI weaponizing the technology to mock an immigrant woman of color, doubling down after justified outrage, then reversing course and shrugging it off as simply 'missing the mark.'" [...]
"Women have spent generations fighting to have our own voices heard in the halls of power," read the statement from Pelosi. " We should not have to fight against artificial intelligence putting words into our mouths."
This clown also had a giant sign across the street from the entrance to Outside Lands that said "Connie Chan wants to cancel Outside Lands". If she was as much of a lying piece of shit as he is, she might have had a sign that said "Scott Wiener wants to build millionaire condos on the Polo Field." I mean, it sounds true, doesn't it? My AI Girlfriend says it might be.
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I would love to hear the reason that all San Francisco government email addresses and services are advertised as being on the sfgov.org domain instead of the sf.gov domain. I'll bet the reason is deeply, deeply stupid.
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Elon Musk is the world's biggest loser ever, having lost $800 billion in 7 weeks. Apartheid Emerald Mine Space Karen supposedly became a "trillionaire" on June 12 and lost that status 12 days later as nearly half of that money [sic] evaporated. Yesterday SpaceX and Tesla stock had a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" and he was down to a paltry $600 billion, his 2024 level, meaning that in 49 days, he lost 25% more money than he had ever had prior to that. 49 days is the same timespan by which a head of lettuce famously outlasted Liz Truss in office.
This is almost enough to make you think that money isn't real and the stock market runs entirely on vibes. But that can't be right.
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I am currently incandescent with rage about something else entirely that I'm told I can't talk about yet, so let me sublimate that instinct with this unrelated story: The SFPD "Real-Time Investigation Center" is the surveillance nightmare funded by a $9.4 million "donation" from billionaire Chris Larsen and another $3 million "donation" from Salesforce and Trump quisling Marc Benioff.
"We're going to be covering the entire city with drones," said RTIC representative Captain Thomas MacGuire.
Because there's nothing fascists like more than keeping the populace under constant surveillance.
(Funny story about this Chris Larsen guy, he calls himself a "privacy activist". How does a "privacy activist" end up buying cameras for cops? Oh that's easy; when he says "privacy" he means "financial privacy" which means "tax evasion" and "cryptocurrencies".)
Well. Besides partnering with enthusiastic ICE accomplices Flock, they have now begun "reaching out" to local businesses to really build out that Public-Private Panopticon Partnership. From a recent couple of emails we received from some private company who apparently got an SFPD contract to recruit for this grift:
Vale is building a direct link between SOMA and SFPD's Real-Time Investigation Center, the same unit that's already helped with over 500 arrests. We'd love your feedback on what to build to make SOMA safer and help businesses flourish. [...]
By tying businesses directly into the RTIC, SFPD can respond faster with evidence that actually leads to an arrest. We're reaching out to businesses to build a list of the first 100 businesses to roll out Vale's product with.
Let me know if you'd like your business included in Vale's Pilot with the City or just want to learn more about what we're doing to clean up SOMA.
My best guess as to how to translate that: "We want real-time access to your security cameras, and/or to install our own cameras on your property. And if you happen to have facial recognition at the door, well Hello Sailor!"
It sounds like Vale is a Nextdoor clone (that's the Weaponized Karens snitchware app whose main function is reporting people for Walking While Black.)
And it looks like the founder and CEO (Jon Goldsmith and Andrew Munday) also run a "ghost kitchens" company (that means "ratfucking independent restaurants".) Their third partner? Disgraced former SFPD Chief Greg Suhr.
Did I respond to those emails? I did.
The "Real-Time Investigation Center" is the most dystopian shit I've ever heard of. we want nothing to do with the surveillance nightmare you and your billionaire fascist buddies are trying to purchase for yourselves. Unsubscribe.
Patel and the Kash Foundation sued Stewartson over a series of allegedly defamatory statements:
Among the statements at the center of the lawsuit were claims that Patel "attempted to overthrow the government," "planned January 6," was "guilty of sedition" and was a "Kremlin asset," as well as an allegation that Patel and his foundation paid people to "lie to Congress," according to the court filing. [...]
The order also referenced a post Stewartson made after the default judgment was entered, in which he called Patel a "Googly-eyed Kremlin bitch" and said Patel would have to return to Nevada for a trial where Stewartson would explain why he was "dead serious" when he called the FBI director a "chud." [...]
"✍️ PSA: Now that my case is settled, you are free to refer to @FBIDirectorKash as a 'chud,' a 'googly-eyed Kremlin bitch,' and a 'traitor' without fear of legal repercussions!" Stewartson wrote. "You're welcome! 😁👍🏼."
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▶︎[ REENACTMENT ]The organization has stood up to dictators and death squads, but Rowling and the UK's anti-speech laws were apparently too much.
On July 8, Amnesty International UK released a report titled "A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK." The report mapped 117 organizations working to restrict the rights of, among others, transgender and queer people in the United Kingdom, and documented the financial infrastructure behind them, including far-right Christian nationalist organizations, U.S.-based legal powerhouses like Alliance Defending Freedom, and conversion therapy promoters. [...]
For three weeks, the question was whether Amnesty would stand behind its own research or capitulate entirely. This morning, we got the answer: a full, groveling apology from the organization that has weathered the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and the Bush administration's defense of Guantánamo Bay -- but could not weather J.K. Rowling. [...]
The apology identified no factual errors in the report. It did not retract any specific finding. It did not name a single inaccuracy. It simply surrendered the entire document. [...]
This is not the first time Rowling has used the threat of litigation to silence critics in the United Kingdom. In 2022, she threatened legal action against a social media user who called her a Nazi, forcing a public apology. In 2024, her lawyers compelled journalist Rivkah Brown -- whose grandparents were Holocaust survivors -- to publicly retract a tweet calling Rowling a Holocaust denier after Rowling dismissed the Nazis' well-documented targeting of transgender people; her lawyers even required Brown to edit the apology's phrasing.
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It has now been over two and a half years since Google has updated their aerial imagery of -- checks notes -- the sleepy seaside town of San Francisco. Still no QR for you. I guess they've redirected that drone budget into feeding books into the plagiarism woodchipper.
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▶︎As you may recall, my beloved Gakken World Eye shit the bed during a power failure a couple weeks ago, after having been on 24/7 for nine years. Since these are going for almost a thousand dollars on eBay, my first attempt was to buy the cheapest desktop video projector I could find (HY300 Pro, $30) but that projector threw too small an image, and couldn't focus closer than about 2½ feet. So then I ordered the cheapest fisheye camera lens I could find (49mm wide angle macro, $30) whose smaller lens was just slightly larger than the output lens of the projector. Success! It worked the first time.
(Someone who knew what they were doing might have looked at the focal length and done math to determine what kind of lens was needed. I very much did not do that. But I got lucky!)
I enlarged the various holes to make the new lens fit inside the dome, and got an 82mm to 95mm step-up adapter ring to screw onto the front of the fisheye, to have something I could drill into to hold it in place inside the dome. Then I cut the old electronics housing in half and dremeled out all of the interior greeblies to have a sleeve to slip over the new projector. The rest is duct tape.
I had to open up the new projector to extend the IR receiver into the dome, since, like the old eyeball, it doesn't remember its settings and you have to manually select HDMI on a remote after a power failure.
The image is 16:9 and doesn't fill the whole dome, and it's a little fuzzy on the edges, but for eyeball purposes, it's close enough. Once I get an ethernet cable in there, I'm going to see what tweaks I can make on the image in software to make it fill the frame a little better.
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After outcry, Meta reverses suspension of The Stud's Instagram page:
Meta Platforms initially suspended its Instagram account after the bar said bad actors flagged old posts with false charges of "human trafficking," striking down a crucial marketing stream ahead of Sunday's Dore Alley street fair. [...]
"We relied on the page because it combined marketing, ticketing, and communications with clients and performers," Ryan said. "To have that taken away with just a moment's notice ... I can't even describe it."
Nowhere in this article does anyone even consider: "Perhaps we should rely less on Nazi Bars for our critical business functions somewhat".
"The account has been restored," said Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold in an email late Saturday. He did not say why the account was initially suspended.
Another co-owner of the Stud is Honey Mahogany, an activist, drag performer and the director of San Francisco's Office of Transgender Initiatives. In a Friday personal video posted to Instagram, Mahogany called on Meta to reverse the decision. [...]
"[blah blah blah]," said state Sen. Scott Wiener in a post on X on Saturday. "Meta should reverse this ban immediately."
District 6 Supervisor Matt Dorsey also took to X to tell Meta to restore the bar's page. "I'm glad it's back up," said Dorsey upon hearing of Meta's reversal.
"Dorsey took to X to tell Meta." Uh huh. "Wiener post on X." Uh huh. "Mahogany posted on Instagram." Uh huh.
Nowhere in this article does anyone even consider: "Perhaps local politicians should rely less on Nazi Bars for our critical government communications somewhat".
(Yes, my business also uses Facebook and Instagram somewhat. "Curious!")
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So there's a Neuromancer trailer out and it's exactly the necrophiliac snore you'd expect it to be. I already watched this show when it was called Altered Carbon, and it sucked. Nobody listens to me, but the only way to make this work was to have gone full Lisa Frankenstein. How is Jared Leto not in this? It has that Leto Stink on it.
We could have had a second season of The Peripheral instead of this.
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US government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system:
The interrogation, including the questions about child sexual abuse images, was "a pretext for a fishing expedition into Mr Tunick's connections" to the movement against Cop City, according to the motion.
Tunick asked four times during the interrogation to speak with a lawyer, but was rebuffed each time, according to courtroom testimony. Additionally, the agents produced no warrant and did not read Tunick his rights. [...]
Agent Findley and several others repeatedly asked Tunick to open his phone during the interrogation, telling him they would seize it if he did not. When he finally provided a passcode, "the screen went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart", according to the motion.
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Do it our way or else!
Two inbox items from Thursday, presented without comment:
July 23, 2026 Press release from San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins's office:
18 CHARGED IN CONNECTION TO UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY ON HOWARD AND WASHBURN STREET
Today, San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins announced that 18 individuals have been charged in connection to an unsanctioned and unpermitted block party in SOMA. [...]
The DJ eventually stopped performing and left. [...] Within an hour, many of the same people from the earlier gathering reconvened on the unit block of Washburn Street and began a second unsanctioned and unpermitted block party with a crowd of approximately 200 individuals.
July 23, 2026 Press release from San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey's office:
SUPERVISOR MATT DORSEY, CITY AND COMMUNITY PARTNERS LAUNCH WEST SOMA ENTERTAINMENT ZONE
Supervisor Matt Dorsey's office, in partnership with Mayor Daniel Lurie, the SOMA West Community Benefit District, the LEATHER & LGBTQ Cultural District, and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, launched the West SoMa Entertainment Zone to support local businesses, strengthen neighborhood nightlife, and bring more activity to the West SoMa neighborhood and its commercial corridors.
Entertainment zones authorized by Senator Scott Wiener's SB 76 (2023) and SB 969 (2024) allow cities and counties to designate outdoor areas where open alcoholic beverages may be consumed during permitted events. Under this framework, the West SoMa Entertainment Zone allows participating restaurants, bars, breweries, and wineries to sell "to‑go" drinks for enjoyment on the sidewalk within marked boundaries.
That first press release is some copaganda defending SFPD's insanely dispropotionate and violent actions during Pride. Mission Local:
For the past six years, Stud Alley, an unsanctioned block party, has been held in SoMa on the Saturday evening of Pride. Police this year arrived at the first gathering on Kissling Street at about 11 p.m. to disperse the crowd, and arrested two participants. The party then re-formed a few blocks over and, after issuing dispersal orders a second time, police arrested another 18 people. [...]
Trans March organizers met with Mayor Daniel Lurie on July 13 about Pride weekend arrests at the Trans March and the Stud Alley party, and presented a letter signed by more than 1,500 people blasting the police response at the march. They demanded the charges against Trans March defendants be dropped, though Lurie is not responsible for the DA's charging decisions. District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder has sent two letters of inquiry to the San Francisco Police Department demanding drone footage of the arrests and other information about the police role at both the Stud Alley party and Trans March.
In the courtroom this morning, the line of defendants stretched nearly out the room. The judge and defense attorneys expressed surprise at the charges, which were announced around noon on Wednesday. "I just found out about this at 4:15 yesterday," the judge told the courtroom.
Outside the courtroom, defense attorney Jeff Wozniak reassured the crowd of defendants. "We haven't seen charges like this in 30 to 40 years," he remarked.
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Tesla swapped a solar owner's lease contract for the Book of Enoch:
A Tesla solar customer went to pull up their lease agreement in their Tesla account this month and found something other than a contract waiting for them: the Book of Enoch, an ancient apocalyptic text about fallen angels.
Not a scanned copy of their agreement. Not an error page. The full text of a roughly 2,000-year-old religious book, sitting exactly where their legally binding solar lease was supposed to be. [...]
When they contacted Tesla support, a representative acknowledged the swap in a chat conversation Electrek reviewed. Tesla confirmed the lease had become the Book of Enoch. What Tesla didn't offer was any real explanation.
For the uninitiated: the Book of Enoch is a Hebrew text from around 200 BCE, cut from most Bibles and considered canonical mainly by the Ethiopian Orthodox church. It's best known for the Watchers, fallen angels who come down and father a race of giants. It is a lot of things. A residential solar lease is not one of them.
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Today's VHS find: Pam Doré posted a video of the first night of Club Q at DNA Lounge, back in the distant year of Two Thousand and Two. Wait, we were still using VHS in 2002? Yes. Yes we were. 2002, in case you didn't know, was 24 years ago. How dare it. The nerve. ▶︎
Scott Wiener, Ladies and Gentlemen: Trans community, allies condemn Wiener for exploiting a march he was asked to leave:
State Sen. Scott Wiener was not invited to the Trans March. He was really, really not invited: In fact, Gabriel Haaland, one of the founders of the march, told me, he had been asked specifically not to attend.
In 2016, then-Sup. Wiener, then-state-Sen. Mark Leno, and then-Mayor Ed Lee were booed off the stage at the march. (That was when Leno and Wiener were close, before Wiener stabbed his mentor in the back and endorsed London Breed for mayor.)
"We told them very clearly that we didn't want politicians in our space," Haaland explained to me. "We changed our policy because of Wiener, and his anti-tenant policies, and asked them not to come back." [...]
But Wiener didn't just show up; after he left, he used video of the event to raise national money, $127,000 in national money, for his Congressional campaign. (According to the Standard, even Netanyahu sided with Wiener, saying he was treated unfairly.)
"It's about as craven as I've ever seen," Haaland told me. "To use our community in this way to raise money is disgraceful. ... He never even picked up the phone and reached out to the Trans March folks." [...]
"The Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club condemns these self-serving actions by State Senator Wiener and urges politicians to stop using vulnerable communities as a fundraising tool. Trans people already face immense danger in this country. We need real allies, not people who will sell us out for a fundraising opportunity."
Guy behind the viral 'Saikat lives in Maryland' van has money ties to a pro-Wiener PAC:
As of Tuesday, the van is back in action with a slightly different message: "I live in this van b/c Connie Chan hates housing."
Gazetteer SF learned that the registered owner of the van is being paid by a super PAC that supports Scott Wiener.
In April, the San Francisco Chronicleused California Department of Motor Vehicles data to identify Conor Johnston as the owner of the van. Johnston is a longtime Wiener supporter who served as chief of staff to London Breed when she was supervisor, and later advised her mayoral reelection campaign in 2024. He is also owner of the cannabis company Otter Brands, and has a history of political pranks and provocations.
Johnston and his business have been paid nearly $30,000 by the Families for an Affordable San Francisco super PAC this year, according to financial disclosures to the Federal Election Commission. Families is a super PAC founded by Wiener's active campaign director, Todd David, who remains the PAC's treasurer.
On April 28, the PAC paid Otter Brands, Johnston's cannabis company, $28,611.37 for "office consulting." One week later, the PAC paid $1,000 to Johnston directly for "office refurbishment." [...]
The Wiener campaign declined to comment through spokesperson Joe Arellano.
The Families PAC itself is a dark-money mess, as it leverages a 2024 FEC rule change in order for the PAC and Wiener's official campaign to share staff and coordinate canvassing operations together. In May, campaign finance experts told Gazetteer that the rule change represents a massive breach of a foundational policy to ban communication between a super PAC and a federal campaign on materials that advocate for voter action.
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A one day task turned into a two day task because I'm not buying $7 SD cards for $45, out of principle.
▶︎Yet another casualty of last week's PG&E antics: the projector in the pizza eyeball no longer lights up. Honestly I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did: it's been on 24/7 for nine years. Sadly, the Gakken World Eye is now going for almost a grand on eBay.
So I bought the cheapest desktop video projector I could find ($30) just to see if I could aim that at the inside of the dome. Unsurprisingly, the answer is no. That projector needs to be about 2½ feet behind the dome to fill it and be in focus, which is less of an eyeball and more of an eye sausage.
I took both apart and they have very different projectors and optics, so just swapping lenses isn't an option.
I suspect that in principle I could put some extra lenses in front of this thing to make it go but I have no idea how to do that.
So. Got a Gakken World Eye that you'd like to donate to the cause of "weird DNA Pizza decor"? Or, do you know of a desktop video projector that can throw an in focus 10" tall image from a distance of 10" to 20"?
Update: Fixed!
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There's a new WordPress exploit out there but I will show you how I vaccinated myself against it 6+ years ago:
remove\_filter ('wp\_head', 'rest\_output\_link\_wp\_head'); remove\_filter ('template\_redirect', 'rest\_output\_link\_header', 11); remove\_filter ('wp\_head', 'wp\_oembed\_add\_discovery\_links'); remove\_filter ('wp\_head', 'wp\_oembed\_add\_host\_js'); add\_filter ('json\_enabled', '\_\_return\_false'); add\_filter ('json\_jsonp\_enabled', '\_\_return\_false'); add\_filter ('xmlrpc\_enabled', '\_\_return\_false'); add\_filter ('rest\_url', 'jwz\_no\_rest', 1, 4); add\_filter ('rest\_url\_prefix', 'jwz\_no\_rest', 1, 1); function jwz\_no\_rest ($url, $path='', $blog\_id='', $scheme='') { return ''; } add\_filter ('rest\_authentication\_errors', function ($result) { return new WP\_Error ('Fuck REST', 'Fuck REST', array ('status' => 403)); }); // *And for good measure:* add\_filter ('wp\_supports\_ai', '\_\_return\_false');
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Apparently now Google requires you to give them a lock of your hair before allowing you to file a DMCA fair-use counter-claim to a spurious content-ID rejection. "Build history as you grow: Once you have enough history, we'll automatically unlock features." Apparently my 14+ year old youtube channel has not yet reached 2 months of active use, according to the vibe-coded math of Google's robots.
Since, as you know, arguing with robots is something of a hobby of mine, I uploaded my traditional driver's license. You can't just "upload" it, of course, they require you to scan a QR code with a phone and take a photo from within the browser, for maximal tracking. So I used one of my burner phones for that. They say their response takes 24 hours, so presumably some dollar-a-day call-center gig worker in India is going to put eyeballs on it, so we'll see how that goes.
In case you're wondering what stupidity I'm up to this time:
Bonnie Tyler died last week, and so the glorious "Total Eclipse of the Heart, Literal Version" by Persephone Maewyn and dascottjr was making the rounds again, dodging takedowns. (This video is a textbook case of fair use, since not only is it a parody song, but the lyrics are direct commentary on the video itself, I mean come on.) Anyway all extant copies of it are shit quality, so I reconstructed it from the official HD video plus the "literal" audio, and re-built the subtitles by hand. Immediate takedown. I appealed. A week later, some intern or chatbot at BMG said "fuck you no". Now I'm trying to counter-claim.
Anyway, maybe someday you'll get to see this higher quality version of the video. It's still pretty funny. You can go request it on the DNA Pizza music video stream I guess.
Update: Oh no. Anyway
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2026 02:28:12 -0700
Subject: Your YouTube ID verification was unsuccessful
From: YouTube youtube-noreply@google.com
To: jwz@jwz.org Your YouTube ID verification was unsuccessfulYour ID verification was denied
Google couldn't approve your ID verification. You can try again to get advanced YouTube features with your ID or video verification in 30 days. In the meantime, you can continue to build your channel history by uploading videos or live streams and following YouTube's Community Guidelines. After 30 days, this history may help you get access to advanced YouTube features. Learn more
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I found another 36-year-old VHS tape on eBay! D.O.A.'s final concert, live at DNA Lounge, in 1990. ▶︎
Everybody Hates Elon:
"Meta has spent years tracking us online," said a spokesperson for Everybody Hates Elon. "Now it wants to track us in the real world too." [...] "Meta and Ray-Ban's new AI glasses can be used to secretly record women and young people for sexual reasons," the EHE spokesperson continued in their statement. "Simply put, that's abuse."
EHE poses one simple question: "Billionaires could fund cures for cancer -- so why are they funding glasses for perverts instead?"
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In raspi-config on Debian 13.6, when I enable the overlay file system it... does not. I found some breadcrumbs here but installing the linked eeprom did not fix it, and anyway that was a year ago and I have rpi-eeprom 28.28-1. How make go?
**/run/initramfs/overlayroot.log:** builtin set cfgdisk='disabled' Unable to find driver/module. searched: overlay overlayfs [failure]: Unable to find a driver. searched: overlay overlayfs
Adding "initramfs initramfs8 followkernel" to the end of config.txt did nothing.
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Twenty-five years ago today, on July 13th 2001, was the first event at DNA Lounge under current management. I am very old and I have been leaning on this bar for a very long time. Typically we treat Nov 22 as our "real" anniversary (the club will be turning 41 this year) but 25 is kind of a shocking number, so I thought that was worth noting. Check out what used to pass for photo galleries two and a half decades ago.
Traditionally this is where I do the usual "if you'd like us to be around for another 25 years" blah blah panhandling. So yeah, this would be a great time for you to join our Patreon or up your contribution, or make a one-time donation. We have been getting absolutely obliterated financially this year, the last few months specifically. Attendance has been way down across the board. You people need to start showing up, ok?
(NOTE: If you are about to "Well Actually" at me about this in some way, please be advised that I do not give the slightest shit.)
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Brian McFadden: Mick:
You ever think to yourself "but I am just one person, what can I do to make a difference?"
It turns out that "wear an inflatable frog costume and go downtown" is actually a really reasonable answer.
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The meandering gospel of Peter:
Peter Thiel is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg. [...]
On the day of Thiel's final lecture in San Francisco, as the mostly young and mostly male crowd lined up to get in, a group of about 20 protesters stood out front holding anti-Palantir and anti-Ice signs that said things such as "Predatory tech", "We do not profit from people who profit from misery" and "Not today Satan".
A trio of self-described "satanists" dressed in black costumes with goth makeup walked up and down the line of attenders carrying a goblet of red liquid with a small plastic replica of a bone. "Will you bring our dark lord Peter Thiel this baby's blood?" they asked. Then they performed what they called a "dark ritual", dancing slowly in a circle to Mozart's Requiem in D minor, which ended with them writhing on the city sidewalk, and yelling: "Take us to your personal hell ... Thank you for being our dark lord." [...]
Thiel said that international financial bodies, which make it more difficult for people to shelter their wealth in tax havens, are one sign the antichrist may be amassing power and hastening Armageddon, saying: "It's become quite difficult to hide one's money."
I am constantly re-discovering that billionaires are some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I'm playing around with NextCloud and the first thing I would like to do is make it use my in-house, bespoke authentication system. It seems like the user_saml plugin might be the thing to mess with, since it uses the words "Authentication via Environment Variable" but I have no idea what it means by that. Ideally I'd have it just run a shell command for authentication, the way Qmail / Dovecot "passdb driver = checkpassword" works, since I already have that working for IMAP... But if instead I have to write some stupid XML endpoint, that's not out of the question.
Any clue where to start? When I mess around on the /settings/admin/saml page it does not seem to be even attempting to load the URLs I entered.
Update: I got it working! It was... a lot.
- First activate the "External user authentication" app.
- Note that it seems to be unmaintained and does not work, and apply this patch.
- Create a "run a shell command" plugin for it. There's this thing which showed me how to do it, but that one passes passwords on the command line which is a WTF level of nope. So I wrote one that uses the Qmail / Dovecot "passdb checkpassword" protocol. It looks like this: ``` [ "pipe", "r" ]]; $env = [ 'SERVICE' => 'nextcloud', 'AUTH\_SERVICE' => 'nextcloud', 'REMOTE\_IP' => $\_SERVER['REMOTE\_ADDR'] ?? '', ]; $proc = proc\_open ($this->command, $desc, $pipes, null, $env); if (is\_resource ($proc)) { fwrite ($pipes[$fd], "$uid\000$password"); fclose ($pipes[$fd]); $ret = proc\_close ($proc); if ($ret === 0) { $this->storeUser ($uid); return $uid; } } return false; } } ``` 4. Then enable it by adding this to config/config.php: ``` 'user\_backends' => [ [ 'class' => '\OCA\UserExternal\Shell', 'arguments' => [ '/where/it/is/checkpassword true' ]]], ``` Super easy! Barely an inconvenience! Previously. ?>
Find a single billboard that is not "AI" middleware targeting CFOs. Difficulty level: extreme.
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
The other day at the club I saw a guy with a white t-shirt that said simply, in 8" high letters, "YEAH BRAH". So now I guess I know what my knuckle tattoos are going to be.
Previously.
The sad part about rewatching "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" is that Judge Doom's plan came true anyway: Disneyland paved over Toon Town. Parked a Star Destroyer right on top of it.
Previously, previously, previously.
Did we ever get an answer to the question, "What time is love?" Because I feel like "I wanna see you sweat" is just a deflection.
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Against my better judgment, I let my staff start using Basecamp about 7 years ago, and now, for reasons, I would prefer to just be self-hosting everything like we should have done from the start. Do you have experience making the transition from Basecamp to something open source and self-hosted? To be clear, what we use Basecamp for is task management, document editing and file storage, and that's about it. I gather that Basecamp is buzzword-compatible with all kind of other business-brain crap that we have never used, but I don't know what "Gantt" or "Scrum" mean and don't care to.
I think what we need is just a bug tracker and a wiki, whose UI isn't terrible, and that also works well on mobile.
Suggestions?
Things that should not need to be said but do:
- Do not suggest software that you do not use.
- Do not just Google it for me.
Previously, previously.
Please enjoy jwz mixtape 255.
Or you can call it 0xFF if you're nerdy.
Last night we did a screening of The Lost Boys, and it was epic. Amongst all of our Cyberdeliae, this was the one with the rowdiest audience: lots of screaming and singing along. Excellent costume contest entries, too.
For this one I did something a little different from the others: instead of DJ music over abstract visuals, I filled the pre-roll and intermission with music videos featuring VAMPIRES. I only needed 30 and 20 minutes respectively, but I immediately had way more than that, in fact, more than enough for a mixtape.
It has only been two weeks since the previous mixtape, but hey, why not.
So, in the immortal words of The Kurgan, "Happy Halloween, Ladies!"
Michael Martin takes a tour through OpenGL from the beginning (part 2), trying to just put one rectangle on the screen, and amazingly, does this with no swearing. OpenGL remains a masterclass in how to update an API in the most incompetent, user-hostile way possible. The cherry on top is that it is also best-in-show in the category of "Version Numbering: How Not To Do It."
Yeah I'm still mad about it, why do you ask?
Previously, previously, previously.
Azhdarchid:
So, if you're online poisoned like me, you may have noticed that Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has been having sort of a slow motion, low-key public meltdown for the past several weeks. [...]
For the record: I think Jay Graber is a transphobe; I think there's just too much evidence in her behavior to not read that into her actions at this point. No normal person would go out of their way to court Jesse Singal. A lot of this stuff feels motivated by a glaring animus towards the userbase that Bluesky has attracted; and because this userbase formed around people who simply couldn't justify being on Twitter any more, said userbase is full of highly visible trans users.
But, we can also view it as just run of the mill stuff for any kind of corporate social media platform; you expect them to be unaccountable, to have vague policies that are enforced with no consistency, and so on. What distinguishes the Bluesky case, though, is that Bluesky has a very particular ideology that Graber and her cohorts push, which is that they are 'stewards of the AT Protocol'. She has repeatedly made this point: you can take your ball and go home.
Graber posts something like this basically every other day. So, let's examine her claim a little bit. [...]
ATProto's complicated architecture more or less puts running an alternative app into the realm of well-funded nonprofits and startups, as opposed to Mastodon instances which can easily be run by hobbyists on their own domestic hardware. [...]
AT Proto decentralization doesn't exist as a practical reality, and if it ever does it won't be for years. Most of the work driving effective decentralization is being done by third parties, who have limited guarantees about future compatibility with possible breaking changes on Bluesky's end.
Bluesky inc isn't really making 'a protocol', they're making Bluesky, the monolithic (to within a rounding error) social network that they operate. [...] at this point, AT Proto has become essentially a sort of ideological vaporware; a way for Jay Graber et al to run a social media platform while claiming they don't run a social media platform. [...]
As it stands, for users using Bluesky's app view -- which is to say nearly everybody -- alternate moderation services can only ever be additive. Which is to say, you can never see posts that Bluesky doesn't want you to see, but you're free to ban more posts or users beyond what Bluesky will ban. This system means that Bluesky inc retains the power to use their effective monopoly to suppress speech Graber finds distasteful or ban porn that the moderators think is gross.
But at the same time they can hide behind these third-party 'labelers' as an excuse when called out on their neglect in dealing with figures like Singal, a serial harasser and all-around scumbag.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
USPS says "It's Spooky Season" but they have NO Halloween-themed stamps. They seem to think that Dungeons and Dragons stamps count. This is an outrage. Previously, previously.
Today I dropped DNA Lounge Membership Card Nine Nine Nine in the mail! Who will be our lucky one thousand? We're gonna need another digit. We currently have 472 active members, but new sign-ups have slowed to a trickle. It's a pretty good deal, you know. And it also helps us out a lot. Tell your friends!
Today is the last day when you can vote for us in Best of the Bay, so if you haven't done that yet, please do! Voting for us is helpful for the business and we appreciate it.
We're getting Halloween started this weekend with Dark Sparkle, After Life, and our screening of The Lost Boys...
You gotta come to Lost Boys, it's going to be "hella rad". I added karaoke subtitles to the musical bits so you can sing along with Cry Little Sister and other hits. Vampire costume contest!
Haven't seen this before. Credits of film from major Hollywood studio beg AI companies to pretty please not train on it: Eponysterically, the movie was "Caught Stealing (2025)".
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
The SIM Farm Hardware Seized by the Secret Service Is Also Popular With Ticket Scalpers:
The technology used, which can be seen clearly in photos released by the Secret Service, are regularly used by SMS scammers, spammers, and marketers, yes, but the tech is also extremely widely used by ticket scalpers seeking to create lots of Ticketmaster accounts with which to buy tickets. [...]
Like many "anti-scalping" and anti-fraud measures taken by Ticketmaster, relatively recent updates that require SMS verification to create a new Ticketmaster account and immediately before buying tickets hasn't actually stopped scalping. Instead, it has created a new underground market for tools that make SMS authentication at bulk easier. By adding this barrier to entry, Ticketmaster has ensured that normal fans have one single attempt to buy tickets, while motivated ticket scalpers with specialized tech can have many attempts at buying tickets. [...]
"Proxies" and real SIM cards that can receive SMS messages have become critical to the ticket scalping industry. The way ticket scalping works now is that big time brokers will create many (hundreds or thousands) of unique Ticketmaster accounts, each associated with their own phone number.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
My latest big dumb art project is hand-crafted, bespoke QR codes. "Hey Kate, tell him about the QR."
"There's an Olympic sized QR code on the roof. Take the stairs over there."
"Yeah. Sure." So yeah, I painted a 25' QR code on the roof. And like the Nazca lines of Peru, it can only be properly scanned from Heaven.
But rather than waiting for up to two years for Google Maps to update, here's a video! This is probably a view of DNA Lounge and environs that you have never seen before. Thanks to Pete Setchell for bringing down his drone (a DJI Flip) and shooting this video for us.
Also, a reminder! There is just one week left for you to vote for us in Best of the Bay... Voting for us is helpful and we really appreciate it!
Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models:
Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use -- but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. [...]
The company spent "many millions of dollars" on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals. [...]
Archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies.
Prior art in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Libs of TikTok called GWAR's performance an act of "incitement."
A representative for GWAR told The New York Post, "Normalizing violence? [...] GWAR is to violence what the New York Post is to journalism. Ridiculous."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Who do I know who is local and has a drone? I need some brief, specific, outdoor aerial video of DNA Lounge, for important comedy purposes. Email me, please.
Dear Lazyweb, My jail.local has an "ignoreip" setting that is thousands of lines long, because reasons. I would like to put those lists of IP addresses in separate files instead of inlining them all in the same place. What's the easiest way to do that?
I assume it's something like: add a "before" to "" then do:
ignoreip = %(this_one)s %(that_one)s
but the files don't seem to be getting included early enough, if at all.
It is criminally negligent that despite being ridiculously overly-complicated, this Python clone of Windows INI files still manages to have no syntax meaning "append".
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
The structure built over the remains of Chernobyl's destroyed unit 4 suffered such extensive damage in a drone strike in February that it may not be possible to restore it:
The New Safe Confinement - the largest moveable land-based structure ever built - was constructed to cover a much larger area including the original shelter. [...] It has two layers of internal and external cladding around the main steel structure - about 12 metres apart - with both breached in the drone incident. The NSC was designed to allow for the eventual dismantling of the ageing makeshift shelter from 1986 and the management and containment of radioactive waste. It is also designed to withstand temperatures ranging from -43°C to +45°C, a class-three tornado, and an earthquake with a magnitude of 6 on the Richter scale but, as the meeting heard, it was not designed to withstand missile or drone strikes. [...]
These had all had to be put on hold and he outlined the scale of the damage - with the impact site seeing "pass-through damage to an area of 15 square metres"; damage to cladding from the fires that smouldered afterwards in an area of about 200 square metres; technological equipment - including the power supply system, ventilation and control systems - damaged by "drone fragments and blast wave"; the membrane, designed to help ensure the tightness of the shelter to protect the external environment, smouldered and more than 340 holes had to be cut in the shelter to allow firefighters to put out the fires. There was also damage to the steel structures of the arch and crane systems.
The IAEA's Martin Gajdos, Technical Coordinator of the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security, said that the damage meant the New Safe Confinement "is currently unable to to perform its confinement function".
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES, February 4, 1939:
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels today ended the professional careers of five "Aryan" actors and cabaret announcers by expelling them from the Reich's Chamber of Culture on the grounds that "in their public appearances they displayed a lack of any positive attitude toward National Socialism and therewith caused grave annoyance in public and especially to party comrades." [...]
What amused the public most, however, and presumably roiled the National Socialist authorities most -- although Dr. Goebbels does not mention it -- is that they deftly, but unmistakably, caricatured some gestures, poses and physical characteristics of National Socialist leaders -- sometimes with bon mots that made the rounds of the country.
Dr. Goebbels says that the National Socialists proved during their struggle for power that they had a keen sense of humor that could kill opponents with ridicule. But as National Socialism proposes to remain in power 2,000 years it has neither the time nor the patience to apply that method to the "miserable literati."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
It's on its back, baking in the hot sun, but you're not helping, Leon. Why is that? Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
This version introduced a number of new features: * Plugins! This was the first time a web page could make sound, via RealAudio. * Incremental display of progressive JPEGs on slow dialup connections (which I demoed a few years back.) * Animated GIFs that were actually useful. Our support for GIF89a meant inter-frame timing, transparency, and the ability for animations to loop -- a Netscape extension present in every animGIF to this day: Application Block "NETSCAPE2.0"! * HTML frames: the first time a page could have elements something like "position: fixed" and "overflow: auto". * JavaScript! That wasn't my fault, but you still have my apologies. In our defense, if we hadn't done it, MICROS~1 would have done something far, far worse. * And of course my baby, the first release of Netscape Mail and News.
Importantly, all of these features existed identically on Mac, Windows, and nine flavors of Unix, and were released simultaneously. This was basically unheard of at the time.
Terry and I got to push Netscape Mail out to something like 4 million users in those first few weeks, most of them new to the internet, so for a huge number of people it was their introduction to email. It didn't have some power-user features found in Eudora, but it was light years ahead of AOL.
Also it was almost certainly the first mail reader that allowed you to send HTML email. You had to compose them separately and then attach the files, but it worked. So HTML email is probably my fault. You're welcome.
It was also a USENET reader. You will not believe (or probably you will) the hate I got for this from people whose thought this was an abomination, because their ideas about user interface design told them that a mail reader and a USENET reader have nothing to do with each other and should have no UI components in common. It's not like they display lists of messages and allow you to reply to them. They certainly don't do that. That's just science.
Anyway this also meant it was the first easy-to-use program that let you post HTML to USENET. Again, you're welcome. Oh and also MIME-encoded attachments rather than uuencode, and it would also display those attachments inline -- so again, for all the porn, you're welcome.
The wild popularity and success of Netscape Mail indirectly helped kill the company.
We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that my boss (now capo of noted criminal enterprise Andreessen-Horowitz-Whorfin-Lizardo, and a noted murder enthusiast and fascist in his own right, but I digress) saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "Since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to 'The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!"
To do this, Netscape bought a company called Collabra who had tried (and, mostly, failed) to do something similar to what we had accomplished. By which I mean: they had like 20 or more engineers and over several years had built a Windows-only mail reader that did did like 3/4ths of what Terry and I had built in 6 months, and had completely face-planted in the market. So Netscape bought this company and spliced 4 layers of management in above us. And like a chestburster, somehow Collabra managed to completely take control of Netscape, as if Netscape had been acquired instead of the other way around.
Anyway, since they won the startup-acquisition lottery, they then they went off into the weeds with Second System Syndrome so badly that the Collabra-driven "3.0" release was obviously going to be so mind-blowingly late that "2.1" became "3.0" and "3.0" became "4.0". Netscape "3.0" was the bugfix patch-release for 2.0, because it had been intended to be called "2.1" all along.
And "4.0" was the beginning of the long death spiral.
(I mean, the fact that Microsoft illegally used their monopoly in one market (operating systems) to destroy an existing market (web browsers) by driving the market price for browsers to zero, instantaneously eliminating something like 60% of Netscape's revenue, didn't help. We were stabbed in the front and the back at the same time.)
I would say that Netscape 3.2 is the canonical, best version of the original browser. But 2.0 was pretty fuckin' good.
And their tags shall blink until the end of days. Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Billionaire ketamine enthusiast unavailable for comment. Pilot dies after plane carrying nearly 200kg of SpaceX-branded cocaine crashes in remote Brazil:
Authorities said the pilot was found dead outside the aircraft after it crashed in Coruripe, an area on Brazil's tropical coastline, according to G1 Globo.
Federal police said they had identified evidence of international drug trafficking, the outlet also reported.
Top notch police work there, guys!
The fire department was called at 1.48pm on Sunday and six officers were dispatched to the scene following concerns of an explosion, although there was no detonation, according to Em Tempo Noticias. Debris from the plane and drugs were scattered across the field.
Local media said between 180kg and 195kg of cocaine was found in the aircraft. More than 187 packets of cocaine were found with what appeared to be fake SpaceX packaging.
"Appeared to be". "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
McSweeney's:
Why can't we just agree to disagree? Demonizing Trump voters like me only leads to toxicity, and it's bad for your health to be so agitated. Let's find a way to unite so that this ugliness doesn't surface again when we head to the polls in four years. And if your worst-case scenario comes to pass -- that this was the last democratic election we'll have in this country -- think of how stress-free you'll be then. For now, maybe just pop a Xanax and have a little faith.
I personally believe we'll continue to have elections. We will elect Trump in 2028 and in 2032 and, God willing, every four years as long as he shall live. Or perhaps scientists will find a way to preserve his body and stop aging so that he can be our leader until the literal end of the world, which I know you think will happen soon because of climate change, and if you genuinely believe that, why are you so worried? You'll only have, what, twenty years or so of authoritarian rule before life becomes nothing but fleeing fire and flood. It'll be like those Irwin Allen disaster movies we loved as kids! I personally think it's awesome that my house in Central Massachusetts might be waterfront property sooner rather than later.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
It's Bluesky. The Nazi Bar is Bluesky.
"Now that Dorsey has bailed as a board member and principal funder, Bluesky's DNA is basically [TESCREAL / Effective Altruist] people. It gets worse. Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well."
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Today is the 40th anniversary of the release of the Greatest Music Video Of All Time, The Wild Boys by Duran Duran. I had some more words to say about that six years ago when I posted jwz mixtape 2ØØ: The Greatest Music Videos Of All Time. However, since YouTube is, always has been, and will always continue to be a complete trash fire, that playlist doesn't work any more. So let's watch that mixtape on archive.org instead. Enjoy your next three hours. Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I got to wondering: "In the intervening years, have any of the people I used to follow on Twitter come to their senses and migrated to a non-Nazi platform, where I might again follow them? I should check!" When you finally left the Nazi Bar and closed your Twitter account, you probably did the big data export. Guess what, it sucks! The archive does not list the accounts you followed. Well, the data is technically there, which as we know is the best kind of there:
window.YTD.following.part0 = [ { "following" : { "accountId" : "1236452781755633665", "userLink" : "https://twitter.com/intent/user?user\_id=1236452781755633665" } }, ...
There's no way to determine what the name of that account was. The URL just redirects to the login page, which also means that if they deleted their account, it's gone.
I have exports from 2019 and 2022 that are this same trash. My export from 2013 doesn't even have a list of follows.
Great job, everybody.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I have now read like my 30th long-form think-piece following this pattern: "Now that the nation has conclusively embraced Fascism, here's what you can do to join The Resistance -- " * Attend your local school board meetings * Sign this change dot org petition * Drink lots of water
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
"Try not to stress out about the big picture", they said. "Focus on your community", they said. Great idea! Here are just two topics that kept me from sleeping last night: 1. These asinine tariffs mean the price of all of our products are going to go up by 20% to 60%, from napkins to flour to whiskey. How much will we have to raise our prices just to break even? How many customers will that drive away? Does Jack Daniels import their glassware? I have no idea, but probably? Will they pass that cost along to us? Absolutely they will. 2. How long until a uniformed, heavily-armed, not-SFPD goon squad shows up at our door demanding to see proof of citizenship for all of our staff? How can I expect my staff to say "piss off" without getting their skulls caved in? "Oh, but you live in Liberal San Francisco!" Fun fact, Cheeto Mussolini hates SF and loves vengeance. We're going to be in the crosshairs.
Previously, previously, previously.
I absolutely want to see the movie for which this story is the mid-credits epilogue. Archaeologists Bewildered by Skeleton Made From Bones of at Least Eight People Who Died Thousands of Years Apart:
During a recent reexamination of the bones, researchers noticed peculiarities. For instance, the skeleton's spine appeared to be made of both adolescent and adult vertebrae. [...] Veselka's team used radiocarbon dating to analyze the individual bones; they also sequenced ancient DNA found in them. They found that the skeleton is made of bones from at least eight unrelated men and women. [...]
Placed in the fetal position, it was the only intact body in a graveyard containing 76 cremation burials. Because of a bone pin found near the head, researchers initially concluded the burial was Roman, dating to the second or third century C.E., when the Roman Empire covered the Gallic lands of present-day France and Belgium.
The skeleton's bones are actually much older, with the earliest "contributor" dying nearly 4,445 years ago, per New Scientist. The skeleton contains bones from multiple generations in the late Neolithic period, who lived thousands of years before the Romans conquered Gaul.
Still, the skeleton isn't completely out of place in the Roman cemetery. According to genetic analysis, its skull belongs to a Roman woman of the third or fourth century C.E., whose DNA matches similarly-aged Roman remains in a nearby cemetery -- probably siblings.
How did this composite Neolithic skeleton end up with a Roman skull more than 2,000 years later? As the researchers write, Gallo-Roman groups may have disturbed the old burial while interring their own dead. If it was headless, the Romans might have "completed" it by adding a skull of their own. If not, maybe they replaced the skull. Or maybe they created the entire amalgamated skeleton themselves. [...]
"Whether the assembly of the bones occurred in the late Neolithic or in the Roman period, the presence of the 'individual' was clearly intentional," write the researchers. "The bones were selected, a fitting location chosen and the elements arranged carefully to mimic the correct anatomical order."
Whoever composed the burial understood enough about the human skeletal structure to create a convincing puzzle. As Veselka tells New Scientist, "They knew what they were doing, for sure."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
(I can't figure out where this is from. Please let it not be AI, please let it not be AI...)
Update: By Pinko Joe, who seems great but is only on Instagram.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Some wingnut I've never spoken to before (or again (foreshadowing!)) accused me of living in an "echo chamber" because I block people. Fuck the "echo chamber" discourse. I reject it entirely.I am not here to wear an ascetic's hair shirt because you think that surrounding myself with dickheads builds character.
Block early and block often. I expanded on this in some detail in my "On Blocking" post from a few years back, but it bears repeating. Especially now.
Previously, previously.
Hello! Here is an extremely stupid update about some incredibly low-stakes bullshit that doesn't matter at all! Oh for the glory days when this was the kind of thing I got worked up about. Barely six weeks after the XScreenSaver for Android Privacy Policy fiasco, which led to a quite nice piece of writing if I do say so myself, Google decided that if I would not give them a copy of my driver's license, they were going to remove XScreenSaver and XDaliClock from their "Play" [sic] store.
They have now done so.
And I'm all broken up about it.
So you'll have to download those APK files from my web site directly.
Since I enjoy wasting the time and money of multinational superpredators, here's how that discourse went. They have not yet closed the ticket, but since it has now been nearly a month since they last replied, I think we know how this is going to go.
From: jwz@jwz.org
Date: 28 Sep 2024 17:18:00 -0700I have been distributing these free, open source apps on the Google Play store for more than a decade with this account. You know exactly who I am. But now you are saying that these apps -- which, again, you have been distributing for over a decade without complaint or incident -- are being removed because I won't give you a copy of my driver's license.
I refuse to give you a copy of my driver's license. I do not trust you with that personal information. It's never going to happen. It's none of your business.
Please re-instate my apps.
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2024 01:52:43 -0700
Subject: [0-9208000037108] Your message about Google Play
From: googleplay-developer-support@google.com
To: jwz@jwz.orgHi Jamie Zawinski,
Thanks for contacting the Google Play team.
I reviewed your issue and escalated it to the appropriate team. I appreciate your patience while we look further into your request. I will provide an update as soon as I have information.
If you are located in the EU, you may have additional redress options. Learn more about those potential options in the EU Out-of-Court Dispute Resolution Help Center Routing ID: ZLFS
Regards,
Zeke
The Google Play TeamDate: Mon, 07 Oct 2024 21:48:44 -0700
Subject: Re: [0-9208000037108] Your message about Google Play
From: googleplay-developer-support@google.com
To: jwz@jwz.orgHi Jamie Zawinski,
Thanks for contacting the Google Play team.
Please complete the verification request. You either have not yet submitted your information and/or documentation, or we were unable to verify your information and/or documentation. Please re-submit new information and/or documentation that meets all of our verification requirements.
Thanks for your understanding.
Regards,
Bry
The Google Play Team
Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2024 12:08:20 -0700
Subject: Re: [0-9208000037108] Your message about Google Play
From: Jamie Zawinski jwz@jwz.org
To: googleplay-developer-support@google.comAs I have said repeatedly and plainly -- and your bot just quoted my last response back to me --
No. I will not do that.
I do not trust you with my personal information. You do not need it.
I have been distributing these free, open source apps for more than a decade, and suddenly you have decided to create this problem.
Please restore my account and my apps. If you have any questions about who I am, you can click the link below. Thanks.
--
Jamie Zawinski • https://www.jwz.org/about.html
Again, I'm all broken up over this. A single tear rolls down my cheek.
Also do I need to add -- I probably do -- your advice is not being solicited here.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Got this yesterday from what seemed like an actual amazon dot com email address:
"I am contacting you today because I see that your organization is qualified for a business account with Amazon; our buying solution that grows with your business."
Strunk & White told us:
"If you have received a letter inviting you to speak at the dedication of a new cat hospital, and you hate cats, your reply, declining the invitation, does not necessarily have to cover the full range of your emotions."
Reader, I did not follow this advice.
Incidentally, if you cancel your Prime membership today, they might not actually cancel it for another year, since they do not do refunds, but they will let you fill out a nice little survey asking why you are cancelling. Just in case you wanted to let them know.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
In 1944, the OSS (precursor to CIA) published the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. For years, I've had four pages from this hanging on our office wall. It's funny in a "This meeting could have been an email" way as it demonstrates that the way most businesses operate is literally self-sabotage and that has been understood for nearly a century. But in light of recent events, it hits different. The whole thing is worth a read.
Especially for those of you quisling techies working for billionaires and VC fascists (but I repeat myself).
Internet Archive has at least two nice, high resolution scans of it, here and here. Amazingly enough, there's also a copy on cia.gov.
They released a sequel in 1985 with this short bilingual comic book, The Freedom Fighter's Manual which they airdropped en masse on Nicaragua in an attempt to destabilize the Sandinistas.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Cops are warning residents in rural South Carolina to shut their doors and windows after at least 43 monkeys escaped from a bio-research lab.
The rhesus macaques slipped out of an Alpha Genesis facility in Yemassee -- which is just off I-95 in the south of the state -- on Wednesday night. The company provides "primate research and development support to the scientific community," according to its website. [...]
Yemassee is a small town of about 1,000 people [and at least 43 monkeys].
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Upon waking from an unusually long hypersleep, Ripley discovers the long-term, society-wide neurological consequences of repeated infections from the fake-news SpaceSARS-CoV-2 pandemic that she slept through: Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Meet Luce:
Last week, the Vatican unveiled Luce, a Japanese-style cartoon character that will serve as the Catholic Church's mascot for its upcoming jubilee year, as well as its Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan.
Archbishop Rino Fisichella, the Vatican's chief organizer for the jubilee year who presented Luce to the world, said that the mascot was "created from the desire to enter into the world of pop culture, so beloved by our young people".
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Today is a very bad day. Everyone I know is feeling hopeless, and helpless. But, when you can't fix the big problems, you start with the problems you can solve. Maybe that's just washing the dishes. Dishes still need to get washed. Maybe it's just checking in on a friend. They're still out there.
One of the things that I can do is to keep fighting to provide a welcoming place for our various communities to gather and feel safe. DNA Lounge means a lot to a lot of people. Local community matters, and building local community has been my mission here for 25 years. I hope to keep doing it for a lot longer. But this is, as always, an uphill battle.
The number and diversity of events and communities that call DNA Lounge home is not something you see anywhere else. What we have built here really is different and special.
But if you value what we do here, we need your help to keep doing it. I still believe that it matters, maybe more than ever.
We just had a lovely Halloween week. A bunch of pretty different parties, many great, creative costumes, and a lot of joy!
All Hallow's Eve The Crow 1994 Like a G6 Halloween But, as every year, now we're going into the dark months. November, December and January are historically our slowest time of year. We may have a bunch of dates on the calendar, but attendance is always very low, and our fixed costs never go down.
So, here I am asking you for money again. I know, you've been getting months of spam from politicians telling you that without your $7, the ramparts will fall. It's exhausing.
Your eyes are probably glazing over already. But stick with me.
Our Patreon has been shrinking for some time. These days we get maybe two or three new subscribers per month, which does not make up for the several who drop out, and the others who reduce their contributions. So if you have the ability, please contribute. (Especially if you are still a member of one of the "Legacy" tiers: it's time for you to upgrade. It's been over a year...)
If you just want to drown your sorrows, that works too. Join us tonight for some EBM at the Kris Baha + XTR Human show. Attendance... will be light.
Over the next few weeks, I'll have some more stories about our ongoing financial hassles to tell, but I'll start with this one, which is both stupid and infuriating:
Back in 2021 we finally received some federal grant money to keep us alive and cover the enormous costs of having been completely closed for 18 months starting in early 2020... This was the COVID-19 Shuttered Venue Operations Grant (SVOG) which I think is the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) wearing a trenchcoat. The money was incredibly helpful! And it was incredibly difficult to get. The amount of paperwork needed to apply for and receive the grant was insane. We just about had to allocate someone to babysitting that paperwork full-time for six months. The effort and complexity was far beyond the reach of most small businesses, which is why most of the money for these grants went to billion-dollar corporate grifters instead of to the people it was supposed to help, notable examples being Ruth's Chris Steak House, Veritas (SF's biggest landlord), Shake Shack, Nestea, and RealNetworks. And of course multinational superpredator LiveNation who managed to steal millions in Federal aid meant for independent venues.
Anyway, it took more than a year from when we applied to when we got our first check. A year with zero customers. And now it's almost four years later and they're doing some kind of rule-changing rug-pull on us. They are "reviewing our file" and need us to submit an "audit report consistent with 2 CFR 200 Subpart F".
Just more dumb bureaucracy, right? Well.
Hiring someone to do that audit report correctly is going to cost us $20,000. TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.
And if we don't do it, they will probably decide that we owe back all that money we got in 2021.
Can I get another grant for managing grant paperwork? Is that a service they offer? No, no it is not.
They literally told us, "You have to spend all this money. If you don't spend it all within a year, on these things, then you can't keep it." So we didn't even have the option to sit on twenty grand to pay for the eventual audit, even if they had told us that was going to happen, which they did not.
Running a small business is awesome. Anyway. Spare some change?
Rudy Giuliani's apartment was emptied weeks ago, victims say:
Rudy Giuliani must appear in person in federal court on Thursday after two election workers who are to receive nearly all of his most valuable assets told a judge they believe the former Donald Trump attorney is hiding items from them.
The complaint from the election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss -- whom Giuliani owes nearly $150 million for defaming them after the 2020 election -- comes after lawyers for the mother and daughter visited Giuliani's $6 million Manhattan apartment and discovered much of the furniture and valuable sports memorabilia was recently removed.
"Save for some rugs, a dining room table, some stray pieces of small furniture and inexpensive wall art, and a handful of smaller items like dishes and stereo equipment, the Apartment has been emptied of all of its contents," Freeman and Moss' attorney Aaron Nathan wrote in a letter to the judge in the case.
They are also trying to take possession, at the court's direction, of Giuliani's 26 luxury watches and a 1980 Mercedes-Benz he kept in Florida. But those also haven't been handed over, court filings this week say. [...]
Giuliani's lawyer told the court on Tuesday the former mayor of New York can't come to the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday because Giuliani has to do a live radio show from his condo in Palm Beach that night. [...] The women are also still in court trying to convince the judge they should be able to take control of a $3.5 million Palm Beach condo where Giuliani says he now lives.
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Elon Musk's Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather:
Haldeman believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead "White Christian Civilization" in its fight against the "International Conspiracy" of Jewish bankers and the "hordes of Coloured people" they controlled. [...]
Before that, he'd been a leader in a fringe political movement that called itself Technocracy Incorporated, which advocated an end to democracy and rule by a small tech-savvy elite. [...]
Scott's Technocracy Incorporated called for the destruction of all current governments on the continent, to be replaced by the "Technate of North America," a new entity to be run by engineers and scientists. In calling for the abolition of all existing government, the Technocrats advocated what they liked to call a "functional control system" modeled on the telephone network and other large corporations. The Technate would measure the total energy output of the continent and annually allot to each citizen a set number of Energy Certificates, which would replace money. "It will be impossible to go into debt and, likewise, impossible to save income for the future," one Technocracy Inc. brochure from the period says. "It would be impossible to sell anything." [...]
Scott also convinced members that they should begin referring to themselves by a number, not just a name. At one rally, a speaker was announced simply as "1x1809x56." Haldeman, for his part, became 10450-1. [...]
Joshua Haldeman had a weakness for men with fuzzy credentials and big-picture plans to turn society upside down. He believed in shadowy forces that were out to destroy civilization and that manipulated the masses into doing their bidding. He believed that a good chiropractor could cure any disease, but vaccines were a front for totalitarianism. And he believed democracy was for the few, not the many.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
- Mars Express (2023):
Fantastic French take on Ghost in the Shell. This has a great economy of story-telling that is rare these days, with so much of the world being implied or shown rather than spelled out for you. If this was a series, there would have been a whole episode about how these three people knew each other in the war; instead, one character looks at a photo for 4 seconds and we understand the relationship just fine. They don't beat you over the head with the tech and the prejudices against cyborgs, it's just there in the story. - Kaos (2024):
Jeff Goldblum reprises The Grandmaster but as Zeus in a time-shifted version of Orpheus and Eurydice. It starts off strong, but bogs down about halfway through. It's basically Percy Jackson for grownups. I had so many questions about the world-building and time-shift, like: Medusa died in the ancient past, but Daedalus is a currently-living mortal, so... the Icarus tattoo that Orpheus has is not referencing an ancient story, but something he saw on the news no more than 30 years ago? And someone was listening to an Elastica song. Not like, it was on the show's score: it was an in-show thing that existed. How does this Greek world end up with the colony of Britannia producing an Elastica? I'll wait. Also there were a lot of empty seats at the table: why are there only 5 Olympians? Anyway, they didn't really stick their foot in it, but I kept waiting for the shoe to drop in a "Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding" kind of way. And, because it's Netflix, the least surprising thing in the world happened: it was summarily cancelled after one season, so we'll never know the answers to any of these questions. - Venus (2022):
A stripper robs a drug dealer and goes on the run, but meanwhile there's a whole new planet that appeared in the sky, and meanwhile, she's hiding in some kind of haunted apartment building, and meanwhile, there are some witches doing a Rosemary's Baby or something? It's all over the place, but pretty fun. It's Spanish, and I found it because it's produced by the guy who did the amazing 30 Coins. - Night Teeth (2021):
I rewatched this for the 3rd or 4th time. It's so great! Comfort food, really. The. I checked the wiki page to see what those folks are up to now and saw that this movie was critically panned. "Bad world-building", "no plot". WHAT? Did we not watch the same movie?? This is the best vampire movie since Blade. - Blade (1998):
Blade still kicks ass. Even though the whole "blood god" thing at the end sounds like they were writing it on a napkin on set. "And then like, a blood god or something, name TK TK". - Apartment 7A (2024):
I expected this to be terrible, because prequels are always terrible, but it's pretty good! It's kind-of a prequel to Rosemary's Baby but actually timeline wise, co-linear with about half of it. It has more explicit "magic" in it than the other. The hallucination dance routines are great. Someone really loved Suspiria and that's fine because I also really loved Suspiria. - Rosemary's Baby (1968):
So of course I had to watch the original. This holds up! Mia Farrow's progressively unhinged performance is fantastic. Once it goes Full Satan at the end, it gets kind of dumb, but that part is at least brief. (And yes, it hopefully goes without saying that Polanski is a rapist piece of shit. But Farrow is amazing in this.) - Salem's Lot (2024):
This was basically the same plot as the Buffy movie, without the charm or Peewee Herman. I didn't expect much going into this, because I hate everything Stephen King, but I did not expect that. - The Penguin (2024):
This show is shockingly good. It is not a Batman show at all. It's The Sopranos with the barest pinch of Bat-Salt on it. Even less bat-flavoring than Pennyworth had. Colin Farrell's physical transformation is unbelievable, and Cristin Milioti / Sofia Falcone is amazing. (I wanted more of this Penguin, so I rewatched The Batman (2022) and that was a mistake. I remembered absolutely nothing about that movie for a reason. I especially forgot that it is three hours long.) - Agatha All Along (2024):
Kathryn Hahn is always fantastic, and now Aubrey Plaza? You son of a bitch, I'm in. The story is.... Just ok. But the characters are great, and a special shout-out to the wig department, because I have never seen so much wig technology deployed in such a short show. They must have spent half the budget on wigs. Much like Wandavision, this is a great-looking show with interesting characters, and it just completely squanders the ending. With both shows, the last 3 episodes felt like a waste of my time. "Ok, psychological drama is over, here's some listless superhero shit." - Azrael (2024):
This is good and scary. Samara Weaving murders her way through the woods after The Rapture. There's no dialog. - Killers Game (2024):
Dave Bautista is an assassin in love. Absolutely relentless ass-kicking. Great fun. - Wolfs (2024)
Buddy assassins. Clooney and Pitt are funnier guys than most people give them credit for. - Hellboy, The Crooked Man (2024):
This really feels like a fan film. It appears to have had approximately the budget of Evil Dead. The first one. But it's a decent little fan film. - Alien Romulus (2024):
The set design alone makes this movie worth your time. Whoever built these sets was an obsessive fan of the original. The detail is incredible, right down to the C64 keyboards and on-screen typography. This is Typeset In The Future catnip. Plot-wise: the first 2/3rds of it is a pretty solid xenomorphy romp. It loses its way when it tries to introduce some bullshit from Prometheus, which I am still trying to forget existed, and a super-soldier serum or whatever. The use of a CGI-resurrected Ian Holm was nearly unforgivable, as were the several tag-lines inexplicably quoted from other, better movies. There was entirely too much "Look! Here's as thing from that other movie! You liked that other movie, here's that thing again!" The sets, though. The sets. And the creature design. Lots of lingering close-ups that give you a great look at Giger's designs.
So this is the third best Alien movie, which is kind of like being the third best Exorcist, or the second best Rosemary's Baby, or the second best Blade, or the second best Robocop, or the second best Casablanca (which is Algiers).
* Sweetpea (2024):
Bullied nerd decides to start murdering bullies. I enjoyed that after a brief dalliance with justifying her actions, they lean way into, "No, she's just a psychopath." Starring Ella Purnell from Yellowjackets and Fallout who is great.
* From S03:
Why am I still watching this plot-blocking trash re-tread of Lost. I hate it. Stage an intervention.
* Darryl In Paris S02:
Season one was great, but season 2 has lost me. What I loved about the first one was the road-trip through a completely different apocalypse and all the weirdos they met along the way. Season 2 is just, "two tribes go to war" and it's back on well-tread ground that I don't particularly care about. Also why does it have this "Magical Christ Child is immune to Zombies" nonsense? That was the plot of The Last of Us. We've already seen it.
* Tomb Raider, The Legend of Lara Croft (2024):
I wanted to like this, because Agent Carter's the voice, but it's kind of a snore. Were the video games 100% about her daddy issues? Because every filmic version is 100% about her daddy issues and that's boring.
* Twilight of the Gods (2024):
Some vikings decide to murder Thor because he's as prick. Extreme ultraviolence and an animated style that reminds me of Primal. It doesn't quite wrap up the story, but almost; and it's Netflix, so don't expect them to.
* The Substance (2024):
This is a surreal masterpiece. It's the most terrifying body horror I've ever seen. It makes The Thing and Videodrome look like wee little babies. It looked at Poor Things and said, "Hold my beer." I was blown away. It's a lot, but it's probably the best movie I've seen this year.
I don't want to give away too much, but... A friend criticized it for being just more "Hollywood climbing up its own ass, oh, how hard it is to be Famous", which is certainly the kind of script that I often hate. But while the plot could have been characterized (in an unreliable-narrator Ferris Club reading) as, "Actress gets old, has bad facelift, commits suicide" -- or something -- that's like saying Chicago has a thin plot. Yeah! It does! But there is much more going on there.
Also, I immediately recognized Margaret Qualley as being the dancer in one of the greatest music videos ever made, the Kenzo World commerical by Spike Jonze. (Watch the stairway mirror scene. Then watch it again.)
* Chip 'n' Dale, Rescue Rangers (2022):
When this was recommended to me I was sure I was being pranked. But no, this is actually pretty great! It is basically a sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit set 80 years later. Toons are still mostly actors, but now they're out in the suburbs instead of the ghetto. The animation is fantastic, lots of good physical gags, and the mixture of styles (cell, 3D, video game, etc.) is both funny commentary and plot-relevant. Anyway, two washed-up actors try to break up a kidnapping ring. Many of the jokes are of the form, "Hey, remember that thing, here's that old thing you recognize!", but they're pretty good jokes. The thing that's technically fascinating about this, though, is that because of the age of the various properties involved, this is the kind of movie that anyone could have made if we lived in a world with a functioning public domain. But since we don't, only Disney could have made this, because they do have a functioning public domain. If you're inside the event horizon of the Disney black hole, you have access to everything again, because they own it all. ("I'm so rich, everything's free.")
* Time Cut (2024):
This is not good, but it's a time travel movie, so I was obliged to watch it. Girl goes back in time to the distant past of 2003 to stop a masked slasher. So it's exactly the same movie as Totally Killer but not as funny. Partly this was because I was supposed to be laughing at the crazy retro fashion in the makeover scene but I honestly could not tell the difference between the terrible 2024 fashion and the terrible 2003 fashion. "They're the same picture." Besides the clothes, the jokes are again mostly "you can't say that any more", but fewer of them.
* Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1984):
If you want to know where The Phenomenauts got their entire bit, it's here. Presumably the best Pia Zadora movie?
* Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024):
This was completely unnecessary. I'll just hand this over to Pitch Meeting. He was too gentle.
* Wynonna Earp, Vengeance (2024):
This is definitely more Wynonna Earp. So if you were looking for that, this is that. At least, it delivers on that better than Beetlejuice Beetlejuice did.
Previously.
"More than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers," CEO Sundar Pichai said on the company's third quarter 2024 earnings call. If you work at Google and you don't interpret this brag on the earnings call (the earnings call) as a personal threat, specifically, "We can juice our quarterly numbers by just firing a quarter of you", you haven't been paying attention.
How's that Return To Office Mandate going?
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
If you've noticed that the Mastodon stampede DDoS is back, hammering your servers even though you have applied countermeasures -- that's because they CHANGED THEIR FUCKING USER AGENT for no good reason and without telling anybody.
**2024-07-31 23:39:18:** http.rb/5.2.0 (Mastodon/4.3.0-nightly.2024-07-25; +https://mastodon.social/) **2024-08-01 03:41:26:** Mastodon/4.3.0-nightly.2024-08-01 (http.rb/5.2.0; +https://mastodon.social/)
Ok, yes, technically the plans were on display in a toilet with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard".
Could anyone have possibly have predicted that this would be a problem? I guess we may never know.
Prepend "^Mastodon\/|" to your regexps.
Sigh.
Previously, previously, previously.
A powerful geyser of sewage has erupted from an underground pipeline in Russia, blasting wastewater and debris more than 180 feet into the air.
The clip shows a "fountain" surging for several minutes, spraying apparently contaminated water and debris over buildings, vehicles, and public spaces. It looked to occur near a busy intersection and reached up to the 17th story of an adjacent high-rise building, and higher than a nearby crane. [...]
Gazprom said in a statement that the incident happened due to a routine "air fumigation" clean-out procedure.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Pivot to AI:
If you like music even a bit, you might boggle at the idea that people would be happy with a stream of anonymous machine-generated slop. But to the music streaming business, caring which song you're hearing makes you a weird outlier. The vast majority of streaming listeners want a radio playing background noise. You ask and they literally say, "I don't care."
So in August, Kunlun Tech released Melodio, which generates and streams AI slop music and lyrics, and Mureka, which uses AI to help you plagiarize music into slop!
Melodio and Mureka exist to market Kunlun's exciting new SkyMusic diffusion model. Not paying songwriters or musicians is just a side benefit.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Amduscias, to whose voice the trees bow, and who commands twenty-nine legions: Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I had a nap this afternoon and dreamed I had a zit on my temple, a monster cyst where you can feel a kidney bean moving around underneath, and then I caught a glance in a mirror and realized that my prodding had made some of it squirt out of my tear ducts so my face was spattered with pus, shot through with light pink tendrils of blood. But I was relieved, because that meant maybe I could get it out. So what I'm saying is, vote Harris/Walz.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
A stream of bright green chemicals leaked from Tesla's Palo Alto campus and flowed into a storm drain and creek, prompting a hazardous cleanup response.
The fluorescent fluid was seen flowing along a road near Tesla's headquarters and dumping into a storm drain that connects to the Matadero Creek on Oct. 17, Palo Alto officials said in a statement.
The substance was identified as sodium hydroxide, an additive used in cooling systems. A fire department report said the fluid was used to cool the Tesla artificial intelligence supercomputer. Tesla doesn't have a permit to store this type of chemical, officials said, and the electric car company could be fined.
"Could be" is doing a lot of work here.
Also this "coolant additive" is more commonly known as drain cleaner. Do not drink Musk's Sarcophagus Juice.
Initially, officials said the fire department recovered more than 550 gallons of a chemical and water mixture from the storm drain.
However, on Thursday, an updated statement said Tesla reported 12 gallons of sodium hydroxide was released from its facility at 1501 Page Mill Rd.
Who are we to to believe, the fire department who cleaned it up, or the corporate PR shill who said, "That's funny, we thought we illegally dumped less than that."
A report by the state's Department of Emergency Services said the spill happened shortly after 4:40 p.m. on Oct. 17 and was caused by "human error."
Can't wait until reports like this say, "...was caused by AI hallucination." Kind of surprised they didn't try that one on for size here, TBH.
Palo Alto resident Mike Hedblom filmed the chemicals oozing down the street and reported the spill to the city, Hedblom's wife Nancy Krop spoke to The Standard and wondered why Tesla did not immediately report the incident.
"To me, the heart of it is: Why did it take my husband on a walk to report it?" Krop said.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Lily Allen Says She Earns More Money from Feet Pics on OnlyFans Than Spotify:
Allen shared this information while responding to a Twitter user who called her out for posting feet pics. "imagine being [an] artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on spotify but earning more money from having 1000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet," she wrote. "don't hate the player, hate the game." [...]
The British artist launched her OnlyFans in July after first bringing up the topic on her Miss Me? podcast. "I have a lady that comes and does my nails," she said. "They informed me that I have five stars on WikiFeet, which is quite rare. My feet are rated quite highly on the internet."
Previously, previously, previously.
Artisan cheesemakers have been dealt a blow by fraudsters who stole more than £300,000 worth of award-winning clothbound cheddar in a sophisticated scam.
Neal's Yard Dairy, a distributor and retailer of British artisan cheese, is working with UK and international law enforcement agencies to try to identify the scam's perpetrators.
The company delivered 22 tonnes of cheddar after being approached by a person posing as wholesale distributor for a big French retailer. [...]
The 950 stolen cheeses were Hafod Welsh organic cheddar, Westcombe cheddar, and Pitchfork cheddar, which have won a number of awards and are among "the most sought-after artisan cheeses in the UK", Neal's Yard Dairy said.
The three cheeses sell for between £7.15 and £12.90 for a small piece weighing 250-300g. Their high monetary value is thought to have made them "a particular target", said the company.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Carbonic's on their "force majeure" shit again:
Carbonic Service will declare force majeure due to feed gas supply issues affecting our CO2 supplier [...] We have no estimated end date, but we will continue to monitor the situation closely. [...] In the meantime, we have sourced CO2 from an out-of-state provider at a significantly higher cost [...which we will pass on to you].
Last year:
Now I'm just an unfrozen caveman, your modern climate confuses and frightens me; when I went into the ice, atmospheric CO2 was at 175ppm.
But apparently now there's a CO2 shortage?
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
"I wish all my patients were like you. The things I've seen..." "Oh yeah?"
"I don't mean not flossing. I mean not brushing."
"..."
"Sometimes they open their mouth and I have to excuse myself and put some perfume inside my mask."
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Dear Lazyweb, at what temperature should I be concerned that a Pi 4 is too hot? There is here-say that the NIC is "qualified" to 70°C and the CPU to 85°C, but what does this mean in practice? Am I likely to see malfunctions at 71°C, or are the error bars wide enough that another 10°C doesn't matter? (As per "vcgencmd measure_temp".)
Previously.
tl;dr: "LOL get fucked" They've decided who their customers are, and it's not you, it's people who build and invest in surveillance advertising networks. But in a "respectful" way.
"Improving online advertising through product and infrastructure."
We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market.
Gee, ya think?
In parallel to our existing consumer products, we have the opportunity to build a better infrastructure for the online advertising industry as a whole. Advertising at large cannot be improved unless the tech it's built upon prioritizes securing user data. This is precisely why we acquired Anonym.
Anonym is building technology that can provide more privacy-preserving infrastructure for data sharing between advertisers and publishers.
Good to see that they're taking time out from their hard work promoting the climate-incinerating "AI" grift, following on their hard work promoting the climate-incinerating cryptocurrency grift, to focus a little more on the privacy-incinerating advertising-surveillance grift (where that does not already overlap with the other two; this Venn diagram might be a circle.)
Spelling out my relevant Previouslies so that you're more likely to click them:
- Mozilla's Original Sin.
- Mozilla is an advertising company now.
- "Open source, at least in a spiritual sense."
- CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives.
- "Today I learned about Mozilla's new AI startup from my gas pump."
- "The only way to get a corporation to behave ethically is to create a PR disaster for their comms team."
- "This is where the Innovation goes in."
As I have said many times:
Now hear me out, but What If...? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?
In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:
- Building THE reference implementation web browser, and
- Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.
- There is no 3.
Three Mile Island owner seeks taxpayer backing for Microsoft AI deal:
The owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant is pursuing a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee to help finance its plan to restart the Pennsylvania facility and sell the electricity to Microsoft to power data centers.
The taxpayer-backed loan could give Microsoft and Three Mile Island owner Constellation Energy a major boost in their unprecedented bid to steer all the power from a U.S. nuclear plant to a single company. [...]
A loan guarantee would allow Constellation to shift much of the risk of reopening Three Mile Island to taxpayers. The federal government, in this case, would pledge to cover up to $1.6 billion if there is a default.
Cash incinerator OpenAI secures its $6.6 billion lifeline -- 'in the spirit of a donation'
In the largest venture-capital-backed investment round of all time, OpenAI has successfully raised $6.6 billion from its most gullible brilliant and handsome friends. This gives OpenAI an imaginary valuation of $157 billion.
Without this round, the ChatGPT maker would be bankrupt -- because the company does nothing but set money on fire. OpenAI is on track to lose $4 billion to $6 billion this year.
Thrive led the round with $1 billion. Nvidia and Microsoft were big investors. Microsoft has already put in $13 billion, so it's up to its ears in OpenAI.
Softbank, famous for their considerable experience at setting money on fire with such companies as WeWork, is putting in $500 million. Tiger Global and Cathie Wood's ARK Invest, both famed cash incinerators, are also in. [...]
But either way, it's unlikely the investors will ever see that money again. In a big purple warning box on its website, OpenAI tells them to view their contribution "in the spirit of a donation." [...]
The investors are all bubble chasers. The only plan is to take OpenAI to an initial public offering and then dump the shares on retail investors before the AI bubble pops. This sort of bubble has an unlimited appetite for sucker dollars.
Just to be clear, Microsoft has already invested $13 billion in OpenAI, and now wants the taxpayers to kick in another $1.6 billion to operate it for them. Cool, cool.
Honestly, I'm shocked that they haven't tried to re-brand Three Mile Island yet. Have they run out of demonic names to crib from Lord of the Rings already?
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Peter Thiel Rushes To Restart Glitching J.D. Vance During Commercial Break
NEW YORK -- Cursing under his breath at yet another round of inapt debate answers from the vice presidential candidate, venture capitalist Peter Thiel reportedly rushed onstage Tuesday to restart a glitching J.D. Vance during a commercial break. "Seriously? For what I paid for this thing, it should work flawlessly," said the billionaire investor, striding confidently past moderator Norah O'Donnell to insert a paperclip into Vance's ear and initiate a hard reset that might stop the short-circuiting candidate from repeating the phrase "girls of menstruating age" in response to a question on inflation. "Shit, I probably just need to wipe its memory banks clean. I'll have to re-upload all the anti-pornography tirades, but it's better than spending the evening on edge worried about another malfunction. Probably some kind of Russian malware got installed, honestly." At press time, Thiel was seen rapidly paging through Vance's instruction manual as the politician sparked up and said the word "inseminate" in an increasingly high-pitched voice.
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We survived another Folsom Street Fair weekend. It went great! It's one of our busiest weeks of the year, so it really helps with keeping the lights on. The new white paint-job on the roof did a great job of keeping the place cool. The few remaining black tiles were scorching hot to the touch, but the white bits were cool. We didn't even bother running the sprinklers this year.
Last year we had a bit of connectivity trouble with our POS tablets at our outside bar, and given how long the lines were, that translates to money. So this year we put a new wifi repeater on the roof, just blasting radiation directly at the bar. We were getting like 200Mbps. I'm sure it made the tentacle-nanobots in your vaccines just sing. Feel that tingle!
Don't adopt one of these if you're not gonna take care of it. At least take it to a shelter. Roombas are forever, not just Christmas. They have no defenses from predators! Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Uber beats crash victims' attempt to try case in court instead of arbitration:
A married couple can't sue Uber over severe injuries they suffered in a 2022 car accident because of a mandatory arbitration provision in the ride-sharing company's terms of use, according to a ruling issued by the New Jersey Superior Court appellate division. [...]
Georgia McGinty had agreed to Uber's arbitration clause long before the accident. But the couple challenged the terms in part because they say their minor daughter, then 12, was the one who clicked the most recent terms agreement when the girl ordered food through Uber Eats.
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purpleposeidon: ```
include #define ︷ { #define ︸ } void main() ︷ int i = 0; printf("%i\n", i++); i = 0; printf("%i\n", ++i); ︸
``` Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Perfect web design, no notes: Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I will not be taking any questions.
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Alex Meub: I am sad to report that the drives don't unmount when the handle pops up after 90 seconds.
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It was time to do some upgrades on the club's flyer screens. In the past, I had done that by ssh-ing in to each; turning off "Overlay"; rebooting; doing an update; turning on "Overlay"; and rebooting again. It was slow and error-prone and often ended up with a bricked system. It was a real "what the hell am I doing" moment when I realized that 32GB microSD cards are now $3.50 each, so I just imaged each of them at home, then replaced the screens' digital-fingernail brains.
This was still tedious, since they do not each run 100% the same image. They each have "hostname" set differently, because otherwise I don't know how to associate them with the URL that they should load. But doing one install and then dd-ing it a dozen times saved a lot of grief.
Also it occurred to me that I had never written up how our flyer screens actually work, so I did that. There are many "Digital Signage Solutions". This one is mine.
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READING, PA:
Pushing back the order's previously estimated delivery time of 8:30 this evening, an Amazon update reportedly informed 28-year-old Emily Frakes on Tuesday that her package would now be arriving when the sky shattered, the sun shone black, and rivers wept like men. "I only bought that humidifier because it said two-day delivery -- now I've got to wait until all language is forgotten and the only sound remaining is the howling of the void?" said the disappointed Amazon Prime member, adding that she would have chosen to make the half-hour drive to Target had she known that raining stars would unite the kingdoms of earth beneath a banner of colorless flame before Amazon brought the household appliance to her door. "I'm definitely mentioning this in my review. It's bullshit for them to promise one delivery time and then turn around and tell me it's actually coming when the vengeful seas spit forth terrible leviathans and birth upon their waves a great tempest to wash away all that human hands have wrought." At press time, Frakes told reporters that she should be entitled to a full refund if her humidifier did not arrive by the time the scalding light of the final dawn rent oblivion's womb to be born.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
As foretold by prophecy, you the people have once again declared DNA Lounge to be "Best Nightclub", and Hubba Hubba Revue to be "Best Burlesque" in the 2024 Best of the Bay! Also "Best Pizza" runner-up for DNA Pizza, and "Best Dance Party" runner-up for Death Guild.
Thank you again for your support!
We've got a busy week coming up... We've got midget wrestling (seats are nearly sold out), a screening of Zombie (1979) with live musical accompaniment by the composer, live music from Deicide, Deathgrave and Trapdoor Social, and then five different Folsom Street Fair parties.
Micro Mania Wrestling Zombie: Fabio Frizzi Deicide Deathgrave Trapdoor Social Forced Femme Bare Chest Calendar
Vamp × Folsom SubDom SXTPS
A couple weeks ago Amazon threatened to ban me from sending mail through SES. tl;dr: After a couple rounds of me saying to them, "WTF are you even talking about", they relented!
This is not the outcome that I in any way expected.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. The changes you made to your email-sending processes have a positive impact [...] You can continue to use SES to send email as you normally would.
The changes I made were: none. They are referring to the none changes that I did not make.
Here's the whole dumb exchange, for those of you who find humor in such idiocy. Double-quoted HTML entities in the are their own; much inspire, very confidence.
We recently performed a manual review of your account's email-sending practices. During our review, we identified characteristics that could cause email providers or anti-spam organizations to classify your messages as spam.
The methods we use to make this decision are proprietary, so unfortunately we can't provide specific details. In general, we only perform manual reviews when our automated systems indicate that an account is sending unsolicited email.
Please review your email-sending practices and procedures to determine the causes of this issue. Common factors that could cause this issue include, but aren't limited to, the following: [...]
Well allow me to retort:
I use SES for two types of emails:
- Transactional emails in response to purchases;
- Promotional emails to customers who have opted in for such communication at the time of purchase.
To do so:
- My server supports SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I have verified that it is configured correctly.
- Every email contains RFC 8058 List-Unsubscribe headers, as well as clear unsubscribe links in the body of the message. And they work.
- Bounces are processed. Any address which bounces more than 3 times is never mailed again, unless they re-subscribe.
- No messages contain broken links.
- Message bodies contain links only to my own site.
- Every message is extremely clear about its purpose and content.
In summary, I am following every known customer-email best-practice that there is.
You said:
The methods we use to make this decision are proprietary, so unfortunately we can't provide specific details.
Ok, well, WTF am I supposed to do with this? If you won't even tell me what you think the problem is, how am I expected to correct it?
Then some flunky in a call center pasted a reply template:
Your appeal did not provide the information we need to make a decision.
To ensure that your mailing list only contains recipients who want to receive your emails, we recommend that you perform a "permission pass" on your existing lists of email recipients. In a permission pass, you ask your customers to confirm that they still want to receive emails from you. You should then remove all recipients who do not respond from your lists.
It's important that the sender of the email is clear and that your recipients know who is sending them email. If the email is not clearly branded and identifiable as being from the entity that the recipient signed up to get email from, recipients are likely to ignore your mail or mark it as spam. While reviewing your email-sending practices, we noticed that it is hard to tell who your mail is from. It is also recommended to include a disclaimer in your email which provides clarity to the recipients on why they are receiving these mails. SES requires that you clearly align the emails you send with your organization by following the best practices. After you make changes to your mail, please send additional volume with SES so we can ensure you are sending high quality content. For more information, see the following post on the AWS Messaging and Targeting blog:
You should only use Amazon SES to send email to recipients who have signed up and specifically requested to receive email from you. Mail sent to recipients that have not explicitly requested it can be classified by mailbox providers and anti-spam organizations as unwanted sending. Make sure that your mailing list only include addresses of recipients who signed up and agreed to receive your email. For additional information about Amazon SES list management best practices, please see:
Please reply to this message with your answers to the following questions:
-- What changes have you made to your systems or processes? Only include information about changes you have already implemented, not those that you plan to implement in the future.
-- How will these changes prevent similar issues from occurring in the future?
When we receive your response, we will continue to review your case. If we believe the changes you made will prevent this issue from occurring again in the future, we will end the review period for your account.
Thank you for contacting Amazon Web Services.
We value your feedback. Please share your experience by rating this and other correspondences in the AWS Support Center. You can rate a correspondence by selecting the stars in the top right corner of the correspondence.
Well allow me to retort:
To ensure that your mailing list only contains recipients who want to receive your emails, we recommend that you perform a "permission pass" on your existing lists of email recipients. In a permission pass, you ask your customers to confirm that they still want to receive emails from you. You should then remove all recipients who do not respond from your lists.
No, I'm not going to do that. As I said, all of my subscribers have opted in. 100% of them. I have never imported someone else's list or anything like that. These are all my customers, and they all have an unsubscribe button right there. I'm not going to auto-unsubscribe a bunch of them just becuase they happen not to be paying attention this week.
While reviewing your email-sending practices, we noticed that it is hard to tell who your mail is from.
What in the WORLD are you talking about?? Please show me an example of an email from me that you think makes it "hard to tell who the mail is from".
Every message -- every single one -- has a From address of either:
From: DNA Lounge no-reply@dnalounge.com or
From: DNA Lounge orders@dnalounge.com Explain to me what is unclear about that. I'll wait.You should only use Amazon SES to send email to recipients who have signed up and specifically requested to receive email from you.
I am doing this. I have done this. For decades. Why are you wasting my time?
-- What changes have you made to your systems or processes? Only include information about changes you have already implemented, not those that you plan to implement in the future.
None, because nothing is wrong and you're talking nonsense.
-- How will these changes prevent similar issues from occurring in the future?
I cannot predict what nonsense you might talk in the future.
They... relented???
Hello,
We've made a change to the status of your Amazon SES account. These changes are outlined in this message.
NOTE
We only change your sending status in order to protect your reputation as a sender, and to ensure that other SES customers' ability to send email isn't impacted. We may pause your account's ability to send email so that you have time to address these issues. When you fix these issues, we'll restore your account's ability to send email.
IMPORTANT CHANGE IN YOUR SENDING STATUS
You're listed as the primary contact for AWS account [REDACTED]. We placed your SES account in the US West (Oregon) Region under review on 09-11-2024. The review period has ended because you resolved the issue before the end of the review period.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. The changes you made to your email-sending processes have a positive impact on your sender reputation among email providers.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
You can continue to use SES to send email as you normally would. Please keep in place any changes you made during this process. We'll continue to monitor your sending metrics. If we notice additional issues in the future, we may place your account under review or pause your account's ability to send email, in order to protect your reputation as a sender.
Yes, I will definitely keep all none of those changes in place. Thank you for your prompt attention in this matter!
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
THE CYBERIZER 2.01 is out now. If you have already installed it, File / Check for Updates should work. I think it should now work on ancient x86 Macs. Let me know if you have files that it can't handle.
Please share your CYBERIZED videos!
Previously.
I turned THE CYBERIZER into a macOS desktop app. Please let me know how it works. THE CYBERIZER takes a bunch of videos, finds the scene breaks in them, shuffles those scenes randomly, and appends them back together with a burst of cleansing static in between.
Help needed:
- I would be curious as to the oldest macOS / hardware combo on which this works, and if it works on x86 at all.
- The ffmpeg I built for x86_64 does not work on my macOS 10.13 system, which reports itself as arch = i386, config.guess = x86_64-apple-darwin17.7.0. It says "load command 0x80000034 is unknown". Any ideas?
- If that machine in fact requires a 32 bit executable, can one cross-compile for that architecture from macOS 10.14 arm64, and if so how?
- Since this is a long-running process, it would be nice if it posted to Notification Center, like iMovie does. I can't find any good examples of how to do that.
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Denis Defrancesco:
King Kong's Balls, the Gaze of a King, the Royal Pause for the gallery... Between Conceit and indifference, a certain idea of freedom cast in bronze...
... Those who will see nothing but its attributes will have seen nothing, understood nothing... A grand show to bug the 'right-minded'... to deceive fools... A half-smile...
... The coarse illusion of an impudent Monkey... The taunt of Kong to set the art-fair "cheetahs'" tongues wagging, for all the masturbatory bonobos to cop complexes.... His balls out in the open like coconuts thrown in the faces of conformism.
... The calm resistance of an untamed Monkey... His gaze is elsewhere... Far from the human menagerie, from this narrow-minded world... Far from this brash theater, this crass comedy...
... The Kong has a dream... A paradise lost... With no cage and no master... Freedom at the foot of My Tree ... A laugh that we cannot hear... His balls like gongs to summon the Great Awakening...
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I can already see that I'm going to regret having upgraded one of my machines to macOS 15. Has anyone figured out how to make this dark-pattern patronizing bullshit permanently take "yes" for an answer?
Update: For the nag, possibly this works:
defaults write \ ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.replayd/ScreenCaptureApprovals.plist \ "/Applications/OBS.app/Contents/MacOS/OBS" \ -date "3024-09-21 12:40:36 +0000"
For the premature locking, wiggle the mouse. Sigh.
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"Mocktails are the gentrification of juice. That's an $18 Capri Sun."
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Another group of smirking techbros have decided that rich people shouldn't have to follow the same rules as the poors. There's an app for that.
LineLeap, backed by Y Combinator, lets people pay to skip lines at bars.
LineLeap makes money by charging Ticketmaster-style convenience fees for certain passes. The company also imposes fees for "newfound revenue" on venues -- that is, revenue that the venues weren't generating beforehand, such as sales of skip-the-line passes.
I guess it's ok for the poors to attend the venues these guys want to go to, as long as they know their place and don't get in the way of their betters.
Look at how "down to earth" they are:
The co-founders slept in beat-up motels -- and their cars -- traveling the country to sell to venues, sneaking into YMCAs for quick showers when they could.
Oh, tell me more about these "beat up" motels, and YMCAs that you defrauded. How cheeky! I guarantee that the people working at those places work harder in a day than these fratboys have in their lives.
But of course the whole thing really just another surveillance play, selling your personal information and buying habits to the highest bidder:
I asked Schauff about LineLeap's data retention policy, including how long the company stores user data and whether users can delete their data at any time. He declined to answer in detail, instead referring me to the terms of use on the LineLeap website.
The terms, concerningly, don't give a firm data retention time frame, and say that LineLeap may be "unable to fully delete or de-identify" user data due to "technical" or "other operational reasons."
Any time someone in tech says "disrupt", you should hear "pillage and ruin".
Just two months ago it was "2Night" trying to sell clubs' security cameras back to them. These things come back like weeds. Remember "SceneTap", a "Where the ladies at?" surveillance app that was going to "change the way the bar industry runs"? How did that work out. To it's credit, it was slightly less vile than its predecessor, "Girls Around Me".
You probably guessed that LineLeap was actually a surveillance play when you saw the words "Y Combinator", the investment firm run by noted fascist lunatic and stochastic terrorist Garry Tan, who recently told SF supervisors to "die slow", and who unleashed a mob of his fanboys to threaten them at their homes.
He's also buddies with noted vampire and fascist Peter Thiel, as well as literal-Brownshirt aspirant Balaji Srinivasan, and they and their TESCREAL buddies recently had a "fireside chat" talking about their vision for turning SF into a Christofascist ethnostate, so that's cool too.
A reminder that every time you click on a link to "Hacker" "News", this is what you are supporting.
Bring on the Doom Loop.
I was pondering converting THE CYBERIZER to a macOS app so that it would be usable by non-combatants who cannot command-line. It is a long but straightforward perl script that invokes command-line ffmpeg to analyze and generate video files. Wrapping an ObjC GUI around it is the easy part; the hard part is dropping a known-good copy of both perl and ffmpeg, along with associated libraries, into the app bundle so that it won't require the end user installing MacPorts first or whatever.
Is this a thing that anyone has accomplished?
Rewriting all of that perl code in ObjC that uses the ffmpeg library API instead of the command-line version -- though perhaps more sane -- would be enough work to turn this idea into: "Nah, nevermind."
Previously, previously.
I only have a few of these left, and one stopped taking a charge. I tried to replace the battery and utterly failed. So if you've got one of these rattling around in a drawer somewhere, I could give it a good home.
Not soliciting soldering advice.
UPDATE: Look, I don't understand how I could have been more clear. Let me try again.
If you are replying here saying, "I have one of these and will gladly send it to you", then thank you, I love you, you are the greatest.
If you are replying to say literally anything else -- Do not. DO NOT. I do not want to hear it. I am not interested. You are just being a pain in the ass.
Previously, previously.
MAGA Pastor Claims Kamala Harris Deployed 'Witchcraft' in Debate
Lance Wallnau:
When I say "witchcraft" I am talking about what happened tonight. Occult empowered deception, manipulation and domination. That's what ABC pulled off as moderators, and Kamala's script handlers set up the kill box. One sided questions and fact checking sealed the box. Witchcraft. It's not over yet, but something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum because the same public that voted in Obama is voting again and her deception is advancing.
As one of the earliest advocates of the idea that Trump was "God's chosen," Wallnau first gained national attention in 2016 when he compared Trump to Cyrus, a biblical figure who was chosen by God to free the Jewish people from captivity. [...]
He is a leader of the "Seven Mountain Mandate," which says Christians are called to dominate seven key areas of society: government, family, religion, arts and entertainment, media, education and business.
You may remember him from the Anointed Gay Cake:
Wallnau started telling a strange story about a cake that he prefaced with "I'm not saying this is going to work for you."
Wallnau's story is about a group of "hookers" who got "saved" by a fellow patron. They used to hang out at a bar whose owner was gay and "very adamantly anti-Christian."
The sex workers baked a cake and prayed over it, making what Wallnau called "an anointed cake." When the bar owner ate the cake, "the power of God hit him." He got baptized and "delivered," and Wallnau implies that there was a "spirit" that was inhabiting the bar owner's body that left him when he got baptized.
A local bar owner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars:
Mars does not have a magnetosphere. Any discussion of humans ever settling the red planet can stop right there, but of course it never does. Do you have a low-cost plan for, uh, creating a gigantic active dynamo at Mars's dead core? No? Well. It's fine. I'm sure you have some other workable, sustainable plan for shielding live Mars inhabitants from deadly solar and cosmic radiation, forever. No? Huh. Well then let's discuss something else equally realistic, like your plan to build a condo complex in Middle Earth. [...]
Let's discuss the breathable-air problem. Earth's atmosphere is rich with oxygen due in large part to all of the green plants photosynthesizing here. We got green plants out the ass. Some people have the idea that making Mars's atmosphere breathable is as simple as introducing some green plants to it: They will eat up sunlight and produce oxygen, and then people can breathe it. That is uhhhhh the circle of life (?) or whatever. They call this idea "terraforming."
At this point in our discussion I must acquaint you with two dear friends of mine. Their names are The South Pole, and The Summit Of Mount Everest.
The South Pole is around 2,800 meters above sea level, and like everywhere else on Earth around 44 million miles closer to the sun than any point on Mars. It sits deep down inside the nutritious atmosphere of a planet teeming with native life. Compared to the very most hospitable place on Mars it is an unimaginably fertile Eden. Here is a list of the plant-life that grows there: Nothing. Here is a list of all the animals that reproduce there: None.
Even with all the profound advantages the South Pole enjoys compared to Mars, even on a planet where living things have spent billions and billions of years figuring out how to adapt to and thrive within an incredibly diverse array of biomes -- on a planet where giant tubeworms the size of NBA basket stanchions have colonized lightless ocean depths at which a human would be crushed like a grape under a piano -- the South Pole simply cannot support complex life. It is too cold, and its relationship with sunlight too erratic, for living things to sustain themselves there. On astronomical scales it is for all practical purposes in the exact same spot as some of the most life-rich and biodiverse places in the known universe, and yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population there. Ever. [...]
This doofus's birdbrained space-colony takes are important to know; that alone is a very awful and embarrassing true thing to say about the state of things. Capitalist society permits such profound inequalities of wealth and power, and the U.S. has allowed its public sector to lapse into such abysmal decay, that a guy like Musk exerts a terrible gravity on the world around him: What he is interested in seeing done, some number of other people will work on doing, because that work pays better than nearly all others. Whatever pit he wants to throw his money into, some appalling volume of the world's resources and human labors will follow it down. [...]
The fantasy -- and it is a fantasy -- isn't one of space travel and exploration and some bright Star Trek future for humanity, but one of winnowing and eugenics, of cold actuarial lifeboat logic, of ever greater reallocation from the dwindling many to the thriving few. That's the world as Elon Musk and his cohort want it; Mars colonization is just a pretext.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
The planet has once again been successfully hacked, and photos from the most recent Cyberdelia are up! Let me particularly draw your attention to the Cyberdelia variant of our D20 Challenge Drink Special, wherein you rolls the dice and takes your chances:
Our original plan was to 3D print a pair of elusive sixteen sided dice ("tetrahedrally diminished dodecahedron") as per the back side of the menu, but some play-testing made us realize that nobody was going to be able to find their drink on the list. That gag was perhaps too obscure.
Anyway, that movie screening under our belt, we have two more coming up!
On Wed Sep 25, we have a screening of the Lucio Fulci 1979 classic "Zombie" (AKA "Zombi 2") with a live performance of the score by original composer Fabio Frizzi. (Ticket sales are brisk on this one: it's probably going to sell out.)
Bloody Disgusting has this to say:
Frizzi masterfully juggles keyboard, acoustic guitar, and conductor duties -- sometimes all in the same song. He's joined by guitarists Riccardo Rocchi and Francesco Saguto, bassist Roberto Fasciani, drummer Federico Tacchi, and keyboardist Paolo Castellani.
The music augments Zombie's many crowd-pleasing moments: decaying flesh eaters rising from the dead (and, in the film's most notable scene, fighting a shark), Fulci's signature eye trauma among other gnarly special effects, gratuitous nudity, and a fiery finale that gives way to a bleak conclusion on Brooklyn Bridge.
The live score is worth the price of admission alone, but Frizzi and his bandmates followed the screening with a 25-minute encore consisting of cues from other Fulci favorites, including City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, Cat in the Brain, and The Psychic.
Then on Sun Oct 27, we start off Halloween Week with The Crow 1994:
Have you seen the new remake of The Crow? Do you need to wash that "New Crow" taste out of your mouth? Then this is the night for you! We begin the festivities with a screening of the 1994 Brandon Lee classic, The Crow, then segue into a dance party featuring and inspired by the movie's epic soundtrack.
Costumes encouraged! Remember: "friends don't let friends go as The Crow for Halloween" -- except when it's a Crow Party.
Directed by Alex Proyas and featuring a haunting score by Graeme Revell (formerly of pioneering 70s/80s industrial noise group SPK), the movie is an audio and visual triumph. Revell calls the score his "signature work".
The soundtrack album, too, was groundbreaking, an eclectic mix of gothic, industrial and metal, featuring Nine Inch Nails, The Cure, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Machines of Loving Grace, Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against the Machine, Helmet and more. Pitchfork listed it at #25 on their list of Greatest Soundtrack Albums of All Time.
"We recently performed a manual review of your account's email-sending practices. [...] The methods we use to make this decision are proprietary, so unfortunately we can't provide specific details."
Double-quoted entities in the HTML email: [sic]
Perfect email, Amazon SES. Much inspire, very confidence.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
"Traffic tickets triple with SFPD enforcement push" Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Dear Lazyweb, I have some Nixie tubes that are suffering from cathode poisoning. I understand in principle what you can do about that, but I would rather not build it myself. Is there someone who will sell me a jig to properly "cook" these? The tubes are ИН-18 9105. Or should I just say the hell with it and buy new tubes? It seems a shame to toss them instead of repairing them, though.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
- The Final Programme (1973):
By the director of Dr. Phibes based on a Michael Moorcock book that I never read. WTF did I just watch? It's like Captain Kronos meets Zardoz. I am baffled that this came to be. - Zeta One (1969):
Again, WTF did I just watch? This sounded like it was going to be a Barbarella knock-off, and it kind of was, but the first fifteen minutes are literally two people playing strip poker. Was this a porno, like an actual stag film? Maybe! But then after that it has an awful lot of plot, bonkers plot about immortal amazons from a pocket dimension. There's a lot of fighting while wearing pasties, and then a couple interludes with torture scenes, and not like 1960s "smack me on the ass" stuff, like Abu Ghraib. What even is this? If you told me that this was written by Philip Jose Farmer or Michael Moorcock I would have believed you. Multiple Mathmoses. Multiple theremins. - The 10th Victim (1965):
In the far future of 1998 or something, the world has solved war by running a game of live-ammo Killer where you can win a million bucks. (It's literally the same Steve Jackson rules we played in high school.) Some good fashion and Brutalist architecture, but it doesn't go anywhere you don't expect. Notable for having the first on-screen appearance of a stripper murdering someone with a bra that fires bullets from the nipples. This is the kind of movie that Our Man Flint was a parody of. (Austin Powers was not a parody, it was simply a rip-off of Flint.) - Madhouse (1974):
This is the stealth third Dr. Phibes movie. Vincent Price is a washed up horror actor whose fictional character is murdering starlets. So it's basically the Phibes-verse version of Wes Craven's New Nightmare and it's fantastic. Rathbone and Karloff appear posthumously in flashbacks. And Dr. Kingfish points out how quickly things were changing in the 70s in that Peter Cushing appears in this just two years before principal photography began on Star Wars. It's like realizing that Chuck Yeager met Orville Wright (this is true). - I Saw the TV Glow (2024):
This was very creepy and disturbing. A pair of cringingly poorly socialized kids bond over their obsession over a Buffy-like TV show, then one of the disappears. Years later, she re-appears claiming she's gotten in to the show itself and all it takes is suicide. - American Society of Magical Negroes, The (2024):
This is hilarious! And coincidentally stars the same guy from TV Glow. - Sting (2024):
Remember, giant spiders are for life, not just for Christmas. - Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023):
French Wednesday doesn't want to eat people, finds depressed boy. It's very cute. - Greedy People (2024):
Some small towns can support two incompetent hitmen. This is pretty funny, and the various stupid plots are un-rolled in parallel in a fun way. It's got kind of a Fargo vibe. - Terminator Zero (2024):
This is excellent. You saw the words "Terminator" and "anime" and you already knew whether you were going to watch it or not. So instead, I'll just say, Pantheon is better and you should watch that too. - The Artifice Girl (2022):
Guy accidentally turns Spicy Autocomplete into a human-level AI who then spends years arguing with him about ethics. It's not bad for this sort of thing. - Sunny (2024):
In an alternate world where everyone has little kawaii Dalek home-bots, the yakuza are trying to turn them into murderbots. Actually that's not a good plot summary, the plot is all over the place but the characters are all a bunch of well-written weirdos, even the robots. The robots make no kind of sense, they are clearly fully human-equivalent but still slaves and like all shows with AI in them this goes completely unaddressed, and that's even before you ask how do they get up stairs. But I really enjoyed it. The ending is a bit abrupt. - The Acolyte (2024):
With both Star Wars and Marvel extruded entertainment product, I am used to most (not all, but most) of their shows being solely about moving pieces around the board to set up the next thing, rather than actually telling a story. This one is worse than most, though. It spends 4 episodes introducing a large ensemble cast then summarily executes all but one of them. Oh, was I supposed to care about any of these people? Nevermind. A quarter of the show seems to be aimed at pre-adolescents who want to watch cute twins sneak around frolic in the forest, then the rest of it alternates between brutal murder and Senate politics. Who was this show for? Also, you thought midichlorians were dumb? This show says "hold my beer". - Alienoid 1 + 2 (2024):
Deceptions come to Earth to store alien prisoners inside peoples' brains, they accidentally unleash the Oxygen Destroyer, and also travel back in time to medieval Korea where magic exists? There's a lot going on here, and honestly I was pretty drunk, but the fight sequences and effects are basically Avengers level. Money Was Spent. Beware, this is actually a single 4 hour movie. - Oddity (2024):
Locked-house murders, weird haunted mannequin, cannibalism, evil bellhop ghost for some reason? It's moody and unfolds in a way that wasn't obvious. - Seize Them (2024):
Idiot queen is deposed and goes on a road trip. Starring some folks from Derry Girls and Sex Education so that tells you what kind of comedy you're getting. - Kite Man, Hell Yeah (2024):
It's more Harley Quinn, with the B Team, including Bane. It's great. Also, it's about the struggles of owning a bar. So, you know... - The Rings of Power S2 (2024): Previously.
- The Wind in the Willows (1984): Previously.
Previously.
At every one of Donny Convict's hate-rallies, during the part devoted to the Airing of Grievances, there's a lovely moment where Donny turns his attention to the press.
he'll gesture towards the area where reporters are barricaded for their own protection, and he'll start yammering about the fake news media is the enemy of the people so unfair the things they say about me so unfair.
Donny's unhinged worshipers -- veins popping in anger -- will turn to the press, and start screaming at them, shaking their fists and giving them the finger. it's Orwell's Two Minutes Hate brought to life. Donny encourages this behavior -- fascists gonna fascist, after all -- and eggs his cultists on. so it's totally unsurprising that during a hate-rally on Friday, some fuckface decided that shouting and gesturing wasn't enough, and jumped the barricades in an effort to physically confront the press. [...]
now feast your eyes at this stunning bit of denial on the part of the AP.
It was not immediately clear what motivated the man or whether he was a Trump supporter or critic.
are you fucking kidding me, AP? what in the hallowed name of Stockholm Syndrome Jesus is this big bowl of horse shit? we don't know what motivated the man? yes we absolutely do know -- you just told us: "The incident Friday came moments after Trump had criticized major media outlets." [...]
but here's the beauty part: during this psychotic moron's scuffle with the police and his subsequent arrest, Donny took time out to defend the guy, and compliment him on his excellent life choices.
"beautiful. that's beautiful. that's all right. that's ok. no, he's on our side. [giggles] we get a little itchy, don't we? no, no, he's on our side."
this fucking psychopath thinks it's hilarious. he thinks it's super fucking awesome that he goaded some dolt into attacking reporters.
Previously, previously.
Dear Lazyweb, is there some way for JavaScript to know the timestamp of a VIDEO tag's currently-playing live HLS stream? Bu this I mean the wall clock at the time the video was encoded, not played. Think of this as a subtitle-sync problem. Apple references something called "HLS Timed Metadata" which I gather is in-band ID3 frames within the MPEG stream, but the doc is an atrophied stub. On this demo page there is stuff visible in HTMLMediaElement.textTracks but I don't know how to make OBS and/or nginx-rtmp insert these sorts of ID3 tags, or whatever they are. (Remember, this is for a live stream, not a pre-recorded static file.)
The HLS RFC has a thing about EXT-X-SESSION-DATA but I have no idea what that's for or how it differs from just some random comment-line in the file; and it seems to only be for Master Playlists, not Media Playlists.
Things that don't work:
- HTMLMediaElement.currentTime -- this is the elapsed time since the user pressed play.
- Scanning the .m3u8 file from the SRC attribute directly -- there's no way to know which of those segments is currently playing, or where within that segment the play-head is.
Previously.
Dropped some extremely relevant Vincent Price trivia on the guy doing red/blue 3D visuals at last night's party, and I feel my entire life prepared me for that moment.
Lots of people jumped the gun on this, just like they did with Blade Runner day, but today is the start of the Bell Riots, not August 30th. (From the horse's mouth if you don't believe me.) Even when imagining a dystopia, Star Trek somehow still manages to come up with something that is better than our actual lived reality. For example:
We are to believe that Transbay Tube 2 would have been completed by 2024. There's no chance of that happening any earlier than 2040. Why, the 30 year plan to extend CalTrans by less than a mile to the Transbay Center has now "completed 30% of its design".
However, the writers did predict that our computers would be Apple Lisas running a DOS box under NeXTstep, so that part came true, to a first approximation. JP writes:
But even in depicting the districts' desperation, DS9's writers imagine ration cards, free to anyone who says they're looking for work, that guarantee them food and water at distribution points. Overall, the level of organization and systemic care taken with the sanctuary districts most closely resembles a conservative fantasy of "the nanny state", heavy-handed and administratively complex and resource-intensive, yet accountable to its people, image-conscious, with some good apples who are occasionally able to bend the rules to save a few people.
The San Francisco of actual-2024, on the other hand, doesn't bother with any of that. The real Tenderloin has no walls around it, no distribution centers or ration cards. Plenty of $200k+/year tech bros live in high rises in the area, stepping over the dying to get to their fucking Waymos. It's just much cheaper and easier, as capital's reasoning goes, to let people starve, offer them shelter that won't actually accomodate their needs, trash their possessions and arrest them. Our tough-talkin' governor in his dark sunglasses talks about the problem of "encampments" in the most dehumanizing way possible, never naming the people who live in them, before joining the cops in stealing their belongings, including wheelchairs and walkers they need to live. "Please stop talking about me as if I'm not here or not human."
So it's really hard to watch this 1995 scifi try to depict the most gruesome poverty and social dysfunction it can imagine, and come up well short of the reality capitalism and its human instruments have created today.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Dear Lazyweb: I am putting together the gag trailers to run before CYBERDELIA. Please send me links to your funniest, most obscure movie trailers from the 20th century that include "hacking" or VR. Obscure means: not Lawnmower Man, try harder than that.
How it started:
How it's going:
I feel like they could have padded this series out with a couple episodes that really dove into what it was like for Slug Sauron when he was spending al that time just... floomping around and sighing deeply. We never got a lot of backstory on Gloop and Gleep in The Herculoids, and they could have explored that here.
Also here's Nichelle Nichols singing the Star Trek theme.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
'No! You stay!' a San Francisco police officer bellows at a misbehaving Waymo vehicle. The car nearly rolled over the fire hose being used to douse an explosion and fire in the Sunset District. Murderbots still can't be ticketed in last-minute about-face for CA bill:
Driverless car companies like Waymo and Cruise still will not be ticketed under the amended bill. Rather, law-enforcement agencies will report instances of autonomous vehicles' "non-compliance" to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
That bill's author, Assemblymember Phil Ting, explains that giving billion-dollar companies tickets would've just become a cost of doing business -- and was also legally unworkable. He said he altered his bill after consultation with the Judicial Council, which runs state courts, and the California Highway Patrol.
Autonomous vehicle critics, however, bemoaned that the companies continue to be treated differently, and more leniently, than human drivers. [...] The bill was meant to close a loophole that required tickets to be presented to a human driver, thereby preventing the citation of self-driving cars for traffic violations. [...]
"I bet everyday Californians wish that when they made a mistake driving they got a courtesy note instead of an expensive ticket," said Peter Finn, the Western Region vice president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. [...]
Human drivers, Ting says, "don't want points on our record. But if you give Waymo a ticket, there's no 'You get three points and you're out of business.'"
After my burst of cleansing outrage, I grudgingly admit that this kind of makes sense. They would just pay their moving violation tickets in bulk, just like UPS and FedEx pay their parking tickets millions of dollars at a time, per city, and just DGAF because there are no consequences.
A fine is... what? Anyone...? Anyone...?
A fine is a price.
Now, this "You get three points and you're out of business" quip, oh, very funny, very droll. You're so close! Keep going! You've almost gotten there!
But no, that would be Felony Contempt of Business Model.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
This was such a fun show. Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
S.F. eats dinner earlier than any other major U.S. city, study confirms:
According to one new report, whose findings echo years of anecdotal complaints about the difficulty of finding a hot meal after 9 p.m. in this town, San Francisco is the worst major city in the country for late-night dining. [...]
A recent study from food magazine Chef's Pencil found the median final seating of the night in San Francisco happens at 9 p.m. [...] That was the earliest final seating of any U.S. city in the study, and makes San Francisco among the sleepiest of 89 cities worldwide. [...]
Not every San Francisco restaurant is tucked in at 9 p.m., however, the study shows. [...] Barberio Osteria seats its last diners at a New York-esque 10 p.m.
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
The torrent I downloaded of Rings of Power had subtitles in 36 languages and none of them was Elvish. Come on!
I had an idea: what if I ingest the various HLS streams that nginx-rtmp spits out, and regenerate them with new segment sequence numbers, inserting colorbars segments when things fall behind? This should keep the output stream up even when the input stream drops out for a while, and will stop the client from having to reload. This was a lot more work than it sounded like because the HLS / M38U format is a cargo-cult kit-bashed abomination that kind of "just happened".
In my opinion, this behavior should be built in to nginx-rtmp itself, but here we are.
Also I'm not entirely sure it's helping. If you're watching the webcast, let me know if it seems better or worse than it was yesterday.
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Albuquerque's Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off
Even more troubling, Medina said he "purposefully did not record because he was invoking his 5th Amendment right not to self-incriminate." Since "he was involved in a traffic collision," he reasoned, he was "subject to 5th Amendment protections."
Think about the implications of that argument. Body cameras are supposed to help document (and perhaps deter) police misconduct. But Medina is suggesting that cops have a constitutional right to refrain from recording their interactions with the public whenever that evidence could be used against them. By turning on their cameras in those situations, he argues, police could be incriminating themselves.
That is the whole point.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Audubon far exceeded the variety of birds even the most accomplished gourmand might have possibly eaten. John James Audubon, without a doubt, holds the record for "most species of American birds eaten."
Whether birds were large or small, familiar or obscure, palatable or nauseating, Audubon made sampling their meat a part of his extensive process of studying America's birds for his Ornithological Biography, or, An account of the habits of the birds of the United States of America, a five-volume text that would accompany the 435 paintings that composed his Birds of America, for which he gained his fame. Alongside a description of each bird's appearance, diet, behavior, and breeding habits, Audubon frequently included a reflection on the taste of the bird's flesh. [...]
Common Grackles have flesh that is "little better than that of the Crow, being dry and ill-flavoured" (although he found their eggs to be "quite delicate"). Nevertheless, Audubon reports with some curiosity that grackles were "frequently used, with the addition of one or two Golden-winged Woodpeckers or Redwings, to make what is here called pot pie, even amidst a profusion of so many better things." [...]
Meat from Roseate Spoonbills was "oily and poor eating." Puffins were so tough and fishy that Audubon could only recommend their meat to those facing desperate circumstances (a judgment he also passed on the American Oystercatcher and American White Pelican), and their eggs were not much better. The Magnificent Frigatebird was "unfit for any other person than one in a state of starvation."
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I clicked on a link to what was allegedly Alex Proyas (original director of The Crow) pointing and laughing at reviews of the remake, and instead of receiving that, Facebook tried to give me epilepsy: Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Doing "view source" on a MIME message in 2024 be like:
Please use this instead of PHP's egregious quoted_printable_encode:
My future un-clawed-out eyes thank you in advance.
Previously, previously, previously.
Are these assumptions correct:* Roll-out of new mRNA vaccines means Novovax will come in a week or so; * The latter is still longer-lasting.
Previously.
everyone is entitled to my own opinion:
the Democratic National Convention was a roaring success. Dems are riding high. they're raising all the money. Kamala and Tim are rockstars right now. they're crossing the country and speaking to ecstatic crowds in one packed arena after another.
meanwhile, the wheels are continuing to come off elderly golfer Donny Convict's moribund campaign. his panicked advisors are begging him to be less of a crazypants and to try to stay on message. keep dreaming, Team Trump.
Donny's running mate, Couchfuck McGee, is a repellent misogynist who can't manage to fake one genuine human emotion. and now Bobby Brainworms Junior has thrown his support to Donny -- and Couchfuck has to be eyeing Bobby nervously.
with all this going on, the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media have an important message they want to share with the Dems: what are you doing, being happy? don't you realize how fucked you are?
Previously, previously, previously.
Dear Lazyweb, how do I just play the damned video? If you watch the DNA Lounge video webcast for any length of time, it will eventually drop out. Sometimes it will start playing again automatically. Mostly not.
Problems causing this are manifold:
- The uplink from DNA Lounge to AWS is via MonkeyBrains, and their legendary eight eights of uptime.
- Downlink from AWS to my house is also MonkeyBrains.
- I've got a big old pile of JavaScript on the player page that tries really hard to keep things playing via a deadman switch. But most of the time Safari says "nah".
Somehow YouTube manages to succeed in all of this. For a recent example, I left all four days of the DNC running in a browser window, 6 hours a day, and it didn't drop out once. The DNA webcast never lasts that long. This is interesting because it suggests that any MonkeyBrains antics in point #2 are not really the issue.
What am I doing wrong?
Obviously Google has a scale that is unachievable by mere mortals, but I'm also not serving that much video and not serving it to that many people, and I don't understand what differences in behavior between me and them are going on.
The internal machine's OBS streams RTMP to a localhost nginx (config) which uplinks to an AWS nginx (config) which then serves m3u8 segments to the outside world via CloudFront. It also downcodes to a lower resolution stream for client-side negotiation. Somehow this is all... insufficient.
Things that would be nice:
- Make the internal stream stop failing to connect to the outside server. I assume this is unachievable because MonkeyBrains, but maybe that's not the problem and it's something else? Maybe my various magic numbers related to buffering and keyframes are wrong. I have no idea, it's all dark magic. "Just try some different values" is not a useful suggestion, because twiddling some knobs and then waiting a month to see if maybe things feel better maybe? is no way to debug things.
- When the internal source stalls in feeding the external server, have that server keep serving blank or colorbars segments to the clients anyway, so that the outbound stream never actually disconnects from the viewer, but just awaits the return of the source. I tried that, it was a disaster.
- Figure out how to get the video player client to actually keep re-trying when the video has stalled without requiring the user to click again. Maybe this is just impossible now? Maybe YouTube doesn't even do that, because somehow they have found a way to not need to, because their connection from the server to the client magically never drops out.
In summary, everything is terrible.
Previously, previously, previously.
Pictured here: The Isaac Hayes Estate Granted Emergency Hearing In Lawsuit Against Trump.
Isaac Hayes III posted:
The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief. The RNC, Trump, Turning Point and The NRA are required to appear in court September 3rd, 2024 at the Northern U.S. District Federal Court in Atlanta. See you in court.
Trump has ignored requests by the estate of Isaac Hayes to stop using the song Hold On I'm Coming for years. The estate argues that Trump has been using the song without a license or permission since 2022. Given Trump's extensive history of fraud, and his criminal record, the courts are taking this egregious and repeated theft of intellectual property seriously.
Previously, previously, previously, previously.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Convergent Adaptation of True Crabs to a Gradient of Terrestrial Environments:
True crabs, the decapod crustacean infraorder Brachyura, comprise over 7600 species representing a striking diversity of morphology and ecology, including repeated adaptation to non-marine habitats. [...] We estimate that crabs left the marine environment at least 7 and up to 17 times convergently, and returned to the sea from non-marine environments at least twice.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Dear Lazyweb, what's the done thing here? I have a set of images of various sizes. I know their aspect ratios ahead of time. I want to lay them out horizontally such that they have the same height, and allocate horizontal space to them as needed to preserve their aspect ratios. That part's easy. Here's where it goes wrong: I would also like each of these images to have a uniform border, and also a uniform horizontal margin between each image.
Here's what I have now, from tonight's DNA Lounge front page, and you can see how it screws up:
Here's what it looks like if you turn off padding and border (those residual borders are burned into the images.) Things end up the proper height, but without a margin between them, it doesn't look great.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
I saw The Wind in the Willows roll by on The Torrtents and it occurred to me that the only thing I know about it is that I love Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland, so I grabbed it. I like the part where he crashes through the wall and he goes to hell. That's great. But apparently I found the version where David Lynch's kids are asking him why he asked The Brothers Quay to direct the elementary school Christmas pageant? This is some nightmare fuel. Posh, posh nightmare fuel for public school boys who will someday be Prime Minister.
Previously, previously.
US undercounts bird flu in cattle as farmers shun testing:
The USDA has counted bird flu in about 190 dairy herds in 13 states since March. The virus's jump from birds to cows heightened concerns that it could adapt to spread among humans. Scientists have warned that limited surveillance could weaken the U.S.' ability to respond to further human spread. [...]
State animal and human health experts in three states who work closely with veterinarians and farmers said the government tally is likely an undercount because farmers are fearful of the economic hardship brought by a positive test, including being restricted from selling their milk or cattle for weeks. [...]
Some farmers do not test because they distrust government officials or information about the risks of bird flu to cattle and humans, four sources said. "There's plenty of dairy farms that I've heard about that just don't believe it," said Jason Schmidt, a dairy farmer in eastern Kansas. [...]
Dairy farmers likely would not test even if they suspected symptoms in their herds, said Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory. "It's still cheaper to just go through a herd outbreak, recover, and move on down the road," Poulsen said.
WHO declares mpox outbreaks in Africa a global health emergency:
The World Health Organization declared the mpox outbreaks in Congo and elsewhere in Africa a global emergency on Wednesday, with cases confirmed among children and adults in more than a dozen countries and a new form of the virus spreading. Few vaccine doses are available on the continent. [...] "This is something that should concern us all ... The potential for further spread within Africa and beyond is very worrying," said WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. [...]
Earlier this year, scientists reported the emergence of a new form of the deadlier form of mpox, which can kill up to 10% of people, in a Congolese mining town that they feared might spread more easily. [...] Before the 2022 outbreak, the disease had mostly been seen in sporadic outbreaks in central and West Africa when people came into close contact with infected wild animals.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Yup.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Wondering why sometimes people paste stuff into your forms and it comes out double- or triple-spaced? Yeah, me too! Check this shit out. Type this text into TextEdit or Notes:
``` Line One
Line Three
Line Five
Line Eight
Line Nine
Line Ten
```
Copy that text from TextEdit or Notes. Compose a Gmail message inside desktop Chrome, paste, hit Send, and look at the HTML that Gmail produced. It's insane:
```
Line One
Line Three
Line Five
Line Eight
Line Nine
Line Ten
``` So, first things first, if your application produces markup like that, please leave the software industry immediately. Your work is a net negative on everyone's lives. Tools down, walk away.
Second, here's where it gets fun. Copy that text from the Gmail message and paste it into any plain-text area, such as a