Month: November 2024

How’s Al Gore?

I wonder how Al Gore is doing these days. Here we are more than 25 years later and it’s not only worse, people have a complete inability to imagine how bad things can get.

I wander around my neighborhood and marvel at everything. The fruit trees, fresh air, pretty flowers, birds, islands, clouds, sky and sun. It’s special. It’s also delicate. The ocean and air are clean right now but the unpredictable nature of the weather means that could all go away – anytime. But today. Perfect.

Sorry for all of us that oil and gas took control in 2000. What does it get them, the few with all the power and money, if the planet they’ve taken from can’t sustain life any longer?

Apple makes iBloat 🫥

Apple’s added more bullshit bloat to iOS in the last handful of updates than I ever could have imagined. Is there an iMessage emoji team? Does anyone on it talk to the iMessage sticker team or is that the same team? Someone decided to add even editing editing to iMessage which I expected would happen eventually. I know more than a couple of people who have whined about wanting italics in their ‘text’ messages. I get it. So many of us use the iThings constantly that we develop our own product feature backlog.

But. That doesn’t mean the Apple product people have to make the thing have italics – and bold, underline and strike through. Why the fuck on the perfect, little planet would humans need to be able to underline in their iMessage. Notice that I do not say text. That’s because they’re not the same and it’s ok it it’s unclear what’s blue and what’s green.

And the they had to go and add effects to the iMessage. Animate a word for emphasis. Make it bounce or get bigger or smaller or even explode. Holy shit we have been missing that forfuckingever. THANK YOU Apple iMessage software product people!

If this is what kills the battery of the device faster I guess Apple wins again if winning means making a shit ton more money for a relatively small number of people. Good one, Apple. You win the toxic garbage game again. But really fucking clever of you to hide it right under the consumers thumbs.

Who to listen to

The playbook is open and the authoritarian is out in the open. To keep sane and able to see the big picture of what’s happening, there are voices to trust and others to be very, very wary of. It’s binary this time, no more placating the squishy bullshit. To that I say fuck no. But first the positive, the absolutely yes list off the top of my head.

Yes:

Timothy Snyder

Mary Trump

Brian Karem

Wajahat Ali

Danielle Moodie

Steve Schmidt

Jeff Tiedrich

Kara Swisher

Scott Galloway

Cindy Gallop

Jon Stewart

Josh Johnson

Seth Meyers

Desi Leidic

Ronnie Cheng

Stephen Colbert

Jimmy Kimmel

Rachel Maddow

Amy Goodman

Fuck No:

NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, Washington Post, Fox News, Newsmax, OAN

Any other hypocritical opportunistic MF’s.

the No Code joke

have you heard the one about the software or excuse me, the app, that just makes things for you and you don’t have to know any code? well, the software can do things but the human has to tell it what to do, the software doesn’t think. and, the app won’t say, “hey, you just pasted thousands of unnecessary characters while adding a three-word heading”. but you did. and I’m tempted to paste it all right here just to prove to people it is true, the shit is everywhere and it’s why your next flight might be canceled. imagine adding new (no code) stuff to this.

one heading: 35,927 characters, 496 lines. multiply that because there are five more just like it on your three tiny website boxes. that’s hundreds of thousands of extra characters. and it is utterly useless, it doesn’t even give you a glimpse into someones trade secrets – although it could.

I just took a closer look and the culprit is Fucking Figma this time. Geniuses. (/figma)

Way worse than anything I have ever seen.

Speechless.

Do not be afraid

Fear. Fatigue. Friction and a whole lotta fucked up. That is what they want. The oligarchs want the rest of us to be cleaved in two and arguing about all that which does not matter. Look at what they’re really doing, set aside the firehoses of shit coming from media – social, corporate, mainstream, no stream – because it’s just not useful. It is only going the fuel fear and outrage which leads to fighting each other and exhaustion.

Standing up means being separated from those spaces which for me can be lonely but I’m not going to live there. I live here where the mountains meet the pacific.

Do not be afraid of anything. This is our country and it’s the only one we have.

~ Alexei Navalny (June 4, 1976 – February 16, 2024, murdered by Putin)

Nope. No fear, I can’t waste energy there because it only ripples outward. It’ll take a ton more energy but today is another day of doing it.