AI isn’t taking all of the jobs just yet. Enjoy this generated nightmare fuel of a “beer commercial.”
Scripting News: I want Bluesky to go away
Scripting News: I want Bluesky to go away:
I definitely want Bluesky to just go away. I don’t like it because if it gains traction it has potential of replacing Twitter as the festering turd in the middle of what should have been a vibrant growing market that keeps anything else from rising in competition with it.
Just leave it at Mastodon. It’s nerdy enough to keep the masses out (for now) and just delightful right now.
Dark Thoughts for a Tuesday
Reading some dark thoughts from The Atlantic this Tuesday morning in re the possibility of a second Trump presidency in the face of the ongoing war in Ukraine.
These two battles are inextricably linked. If America stumbles even deeper into authoritarian darkness than it already has, Ukraine is lost. If Ukraine is lost, Europe and the West face an existential threat not only to our physical security but also to our democratic civilization.
Please America. Please be collectively rational and don’t let this nightmare come true!
Expulsion Hearings for the Tennessee Three
From my catbird seat in Georgia just south of Chattanooga, Tenn., I watched agape on April 6, 2023, while racist Tennessee legislators kicked fellow elected officials out of their club.
Democratic legislators Justin Jones, Gloria Johnson, and Justin Pearson sat through hours of “debate” about their offenses. What did they do to garner what may be the ultimate punishment in a legislative body? They calmly walked to the front of the chamber and joined in chants of support for sane gun laws with protesters in the gallery.
This was simply too much for rule-abiding Republicans that hold a supermajority. They decried this horrible breach of decorum led three Republicans to immediately file three separate resolutions to oust their colleagues.
The Nation, in an article titled “The Tennessee GOP’s Shameful Expulsion of 2 Black Legislators” touched on some precedents.
It’s worth noting that [former House Speaker Glen] Casada, the GOP leader at the center of that episode, was forced to resign after he was arrested on 20 federal counts stemming from a bribery and kickback scheme. As Jones noted in his eloquent speech before the assembly yesterday, Casada never came up for an expulsion vote, nor did members who had committed child molestation, domestic violence, and sexual harassment. Indeed, a member who had urinated on another member’s seat—a textbook example of the “poor decorum” charge that Jones and Pearson were railroaded out of the legislature on—suffered no expulsion vote. There have been just three expulsion votes in the legislature’s history. The most recent, in 2016, resulted in the expulsion of Jeremy Durham, who was investigated for months after more than 20 women came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment.
After three lengthy dog and pony shows, legislators gathered the necessary votes to expel two black men from the statehouse; however, they could not muster enough votes to expel their white colleague from office. From my seat, it reeks of the racist fascism rumbling through our democracy. This note in The New Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition reminds us what fascism looks like.
Fascism tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group, a contempt for democracy, an insistence on obedience to a powerful leader, and a strong demagogic approach.
The people of their respective districts knew who they voted for and that’s why they sent them to Nashville. Those representatives are able to run again for the same seats. My hope is their constituents will reward their bravery by returning them to Nashville.
On Working from Home
At my previous job, I spent some time working from home in 2020–2021 after the COVID pandemic really hooked its tendrils into the globe. My current job doesn’t even have an office so working from home is the only option. Overall, it’s been terrific.
If employees have no need to meet directly with each other, greet the public, or produce something that requires them to be on site (manufacturing and retail come to mind), I see no reason anyone should not work from home.
I have been more productive and more willing to work flexibly to get work done. That also means I can work in a load of dishes or laundry and it doesn’t subtract from the quality of my work on the job. Tragic overlords including the likes of Phony Stark requiring butts in seats are holding on to a 1950s way of thinking that is slipping away. I say good riddance.
Videos I Like a Lot
These are two videos I stumble back on to rewatch from time to time. Maybe you’ll like them too. Probably NSFW.
One of Many Posts about the Rise and Fall of Twitter
While it is probably too far to say Twitter is important to me, I can say I have found and followed many internet acquaintances through their tweets.
Some of these pals I found from their blogs showcasing then-new links to their Twitter feed. Others I found through the web Twitter wove among those users’ follows and followers.
Over time, Twitter moved from hilarious quips recorded on Favrd (and the spinoff Favstar, which somehow warrants its own Wikipedia entry) to the potential “free-for-all hellscape” it has become under current billionaire owner Elon Musk ownership.[1]
To my memory, Twitter (née twttr) was the first social network. Again, without looking anything up (and with the possible exception of MySpace),[2] Facebook and Instagram et al followed in its wake.
The character limits were refreshing relative to blogs and posts. If you couldn’t say it in 140 characters, you just couldn’t say it. This lead to a resurgence in pithy humor and the art of the one-liner. Though I have many faves, I think my favorite of all time was a tweet by Daring Fireball’s John Gruber.
“I don’t gamble. I don’t drink. My one vice is buying a new iPhone every summer. Well, that and lying about drinking and gambling.” —John Gruber
How far Twitter has fallen since those idyllic days.
On Oct. 28, Musk reassured users.
“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.” —Elon Musk
On Nov. 19, Twitter’s new Supreme Leader took a hard Right after posting a Twitter poll to “allow the people to decide.”
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” —Elon Musk
Because saying something in Latin makes him sound smart and official. Right? Wrong! Case in point…
Totum diem Latine loqui possum gratias Google Translate.
Being a billionaire doesn’t necessarily make you smart. It sometimes means a person was born into wealth and fell upward thanks to help from their family and dumb luck.
As quoted in the Washington Post, the NAACP summed the current situation nicely.
“In Elon Musk’s Twittersphere, you can incite an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which led to the deaths of multiple people, and still be allowed to spew hate speech and violent conspiracies on his platform,” it said in a statement. “If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all.”
Indeed.
Dressing Up Your Terminal
My terminal was already pretty cool thanks to zsh and oh-my-zsh (see Tricking Out iTerm2, but I recently found a fun little app that make working in the terminal a lot more fun (and colorful)!
Meet lolcat.
rainbow coloring effect for text console display
It doesn’t do much by itself, but make a few aliases and pipe them to lolcat for a much more entertaining ls view.
Fun!
Against the Death Penalty
BBEdit Preference Fix
After finding trouble updating the Preview preferences in BBEdit (the venerable text editor from Barebones Software), the company shared the fix.
My problem was the preference options didn’t recognize items I knew I had installed in /opt/homebrew/bin using Homebrew.
It turns out BBEdit runs as a non-interactive shell so it never loads my $PATH from .zshrc. The simple fix is to create a new dotfile in my home directory at ~/.zshenv and include my $PATH options there. A quick restart of BBEdit and everything I wanted was available for selection.
All of the details are provided on the Barebones site at Regarding environment variables when using “zsh”. Props to @BBEdit for responding to my question on Twitter in less than 10 minutes. The app is already awesome, but becomes more so because of the phenomenal support!