Archive

Me: I’m sick of paying $50 a year for Feedbin Also me: I’ll host my own FreshRSS instance with a .media domain name that renews for $60 a year

I decided against starting a second blog. I was trying out Ghost because I thought it would be cool to have a site I could eventually monetize in some way, but I don’t wanna ruin something I do for fun. Might do more with WallChicken.net one day, but for now it’s a gif of Simon Belmont 🫡

I’ve been a diehard Tiny & Sumo theme user since I came to Micro.blog but I’ve gotta say, MNML is so rad! Super clean and easy to tweak the style. Bonus points for being built by a fellow punk rocker too lol thanks @jim!

So You Got Drunk and Bought Eight Domain Names You’ll Never Use — a self help book, by me

I’m getting this PikaPods/Ghost setup figured out after all. It took me a minute to grasp needing something like Mailgun to do automated emails for logins, etc but it makes sense. I’m not doing too bad for my first time deploying a fancy web app instead of using some old school host with …

The more I explore self hosting, the more I appreciate how easy it is to use Micro.blog 🫣

AI-Generated Music Is Starting to Crowd Out the Real Stuff on Streaming Platforms: [The Velvet Sundown] which now boasts over 750,000 monthly listeners, has no presence beyond social media. Everything it puts out — band photos, album covers, and especially the music — show telltale signs of having …

You’ll all be doing it tomorrow: 

I used to watch a lot of Rick and Morty. One of my all-time favorite episodes is the one where a bunch of parasitic aliens get loose from Rick’s lab and he has to quarantine the house so they can’t escape and wreak havoc on the rest of the world.

It would’ve been a shitshow for …

Tonight, we’re drinking Writers' Tears 🍻

UFO whistleblowers at the congressional hearing when asked what evidence they have, who’s piloting the crafts and where they were spotted:

Want a job? Just put ‘AI skills’ on your resume This is the new version of grandma thinking you’re a computer whiz because you can type without looking

There’s nothing like the calm after you finally address the thing you’ve been stressing over all day.

Musk, Gates, and Zuckerberg announce the end of the smartphone Elon Musk is betting everything on Neuralink, a brain-machine interface that allows for device control through thought…Bill Gates is promoting electronic tattoos equipped with nanosensors…Mark Zuckerberg is betting on …

People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into “ChatGPT Psychosis”: At the core of the issue seems to be that ChatGPT, which is powered by a large language model (LLM), is deeply prone to agreeing with users and telling them what they want to hear. When people …

Some notes on piracy: 

I liked this video. He talks about how Gen Z grew up in a world where no one actually owns anything. From a Kindle library to music, movies/TV shows and even video games, we don’t really own our media anymore. I have exactly four physical games for my Switch and I think two or three for the …

ROM hacks I'm playing this week: 

Remember when the internet was still new, and you could spend hours digging through random websites, stumbling on weird little corners full of esoteric info you couldn’t find anywhere else?

Lately, that’s what RomHacking.net has felt like for me. There are tons of mods and hacks that breathe new …

Quake remains a timeless and highly influential first-person shooter that continues to engage gamers with its challenging gameplay and dark atmosphere.

After 10 years of development, the emulator that lets you play NES games in full 3D has been fully released 3dSen, the amazing emulator that lets you play all the NES games in full 3D, has left Early Access and has been fully released. Created by a single dev over 10 years, this is a must for all …

Got my copy of Carrier Pigeon Quarterly! @kalikambo is the authority on zines around here imo so when I saw her post about this a while back I thought it would be a great way to start getting into this stuff. It’s a quarterly catalogue of zines with QR codes linking right to each …

Seeing Through It Over time, transparency in technology became a bit of a trend in itself—resulting in see-through music players, pagers, and even telephones...Transparency wasn’t just about making something look futuristic—but clearly demonstrating to apprehensive consumers that technology had …

Really good interview with Kevin Rose on the Digg revamp and making the web more human. Honestly I feel some social web vibes here… Like it’s not really indie I guess but anything to humanize the web is a win for me. Most of us are here because we’re sick of what social media has …

Trump’s EPA to “reconsider” ban on asbestos On Monday, the EPA, now under the Trump administration, filed court documents saying that it "now intends to reconsider the [ban],"and it "expects that this process, including any regulatory changes, will take approximately 30 months." Trump’s …

pico-mac-nano : a diminutive macintosh facsimile - 1bitrainbow pico-mac-nano is a miniature, functional, scale replica of the original 1984 Apple Macintosh. It is 62mm high (no, that’s not a typo) and has USB keyboard and mouse support I was browsing Digg a little bit ago and came across a link to …

Yooo Digg.com TestFlight just launched! I didn’t think it would be here so soon! 🤩🪏 It feels like Christmas in June. I never thought I’d be using Digg.com as a mobile app in 2025!

I’ve been test driving Overcast for the last few days. Apple Podcasts is too cluttered for my taste but going full RSS feels too stripped down. I honestly love the way they do advertising on the free version—they just showcase podcasts at the bottom instead of normal ads. Really liking it so …

GameStop CEO Says The Company’s Future Isn’t In Games GameStop is leaning heavily to trading cards as part of its future strategy, according to CEO Ryan Cohen. The news comes as a part of larger strategy shift to buy and hold a lot of bitcoin. Hmmmmmm. I wonder if they’re going …

I love thebackgroundnpc’s take on this. Nintendo is the Disney of gaming—they feel so cozy at the surface but then you realize their business model is capitalizing on nostalgia without bringing anything new to the table. They’re just selling us the same stuff over and over again at …

From their new album NEVER ENOUGH: Turnstile - SOLE I fucking love this band! I never really gave them a chance until we saw Blink-182 in Cleveland a couple years back and they opened for them. I listened to their last record GLOW ON on repeat for weeks after that. First new release in four years!

Skip some of the upgrades: 

If you read this blog, you know I’m going through an obsession with retro gaming right now. If you’re on the indie web, you’re probably a fan of old tech like RSS. There are plenty of algorithm-driven, much newer, much more high tech alternatives, but RSS is so simple and yet …

Pico 8 demakes you can play in your browser: 

I’m still on my Pico 8 kick. It kills me how many hilarious demakes there are for this little fantasy console. You can play all of these right in your browser – you even get touchscreen controls if you’re on a phone or tablet but certain ones like Linecraft and Pico Zombie Garden …

Apple will end support for Intel Macs next year, macOS 27 will require Apple Silicon During the Platforms State of the Union at WWDC, Apple just announced that macOS 26 Tahoe will be the last release of macOS that supports Intel. That means from next year, major new versions of Apple’s desktop …

Arachnophobia warning: pink toe tarantula smacks a couple of crickets: This is a video of my pink toe tarantula, Alucard, going after two crickets. At first I thought he came in too hot and just missed both of them, gave up and went back to his web to sulk. Then I came back a few minutes later and one of the crickets made its way to the ceiling of the enclosure and …

The secret to actually enjoying Castlevania III: 

Once I finished Blasphemous 2 on the Switch, it was clear that I was smack in the middle of a brand new addiction. An addiction with no real side effects, aside from blind rage when things seem impossible. And the only withdrawal symptoms are intense cravings when I’m busy with meaningless, …

Scientists at Loughborough University create ‘world’s smallest violin’ The violin measures 35 microns long and 13 microns wide, with a micron being one millionth of a metre. A human hair typically ranges from 17 to 180 microns in diameter, for comparison. That’s pretty …

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a separate blog for retro gaming stuff but I think that would take away from my personal blog here. I like having everything mixed together in one chaotic place.

New handheld console, why I love emulators: 

Ever since I picked up my R36S handheld a few months ago, I’ve been obsessed with these Chinese emulator consoles. They’re tiny Linux computers that can run anything from the Atari 2600 up to Nintendo DS and even ports of more modern PC games like Stardew Valley.

Democrats eye a villain-to-ally arc for Elon Musk “I’m a believer in redemption, and he is telling the truth about the legislation,” said Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.). But, he added, Musk has “done an enormous amount of damage” and “there are Democrats who see his decimation of the federal …

Bought a couple giant Madagascar hissing cockroaches for my tarantula. He didn’t really like them and one was way too big to feed him anyway, so I’m keeping that one as a pet. These things can live up to seven five years! 🪳 Girlfriend is not happy. Will probably post …

Nazi punks fuck off 👊: Source: r/Fauxmoi - Crowd kicks guy wearing Nazi shirt out of Punk Rock Bowling concert in Vegas

From Digg Groundbreakers: ICYMI: christianselig, creator of Apollo, the beloved (and now dearly departed) 3rd party Reddit app, has officially joined Digg as an advisor. Kevin shared the news in a recent update, but if you missed it: yes, that Christian is now helping us shape the future of Digg’s …

Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Claude Opus 4 to act as an assistant for a fictional company and consider the long-term consequences of its actions. Safety testers then gave Claude Opus 4 access to …

Senate Dems Hand Trump a Win by Backing Stablecoin Bill “Many senators, myself included, have very real concerns about the Trump family’s use of crypto… But we cannot allow that corruption to blind us to the broader reality: blockchain technology is here to stay.” - Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va …

Unknown Species of Bacteria Discovered in China’s Space Station Swabs from China’s Tiangong space station reveal traces of a bacterium unseen on Earth, with characteristics that may help it function under stressful environmental conditions hundreds of kilometers above the planet’s …

PICO-8 - The tiny fantasy console that runs on .PNGs: 

Retro games are my jam. Anything with at least 8 bits, a sword, and a dungeon to escape can usually keep me occupied for hours days. Lately, I’ve been going through a Metroidvania kick on the Switch, but yesterday I started playing with my R36S handheld for the first time in a few weeks when …

Blogging for the future: I was surfing different streaming apps last night when I realized Peacock has the entire backlog of Saturday Night Live available to watch. My favorites were always the 90’s stuff, so I started with one that Tom Hanks hosted back in 1992, just a few weeks after the Rodney King riots. George …

This news from the Digg.com Groundbreaker group is a week or two old at this point, but the mobile app looks like it’s coming along pretty nicely! Love that they’re building this alongside the website right from the start.

I know I’m getting old because I’m starting to actually look forward to riding around the yard on a little red mower every week like Hank Hill.

I'm a n00b: 

As someone who is obsessed with super punishing Metroidvanias, I have an embarrassing confession to make.

Jeff Bezos sparks firestorm after troubling image surfaces from airfield: ‘But they won’t be giving raises this year’ Bezos' private jet usage seems to contradict the company’s public stance of being climate-friendly. He is not the only executive whose practices are not in …

VPN firm says it didn’t know customers had lifetime subscriptions, cancels them [VPNSecure] owners told customers that they didn’t know about the lifetime subscriptions when they bought VPNSecure, and they cannot honor the purchases. It’s almost like they’re taking a page right …

I keep seeing ads on TikTok for these barefoot shoes. I’m sure they’re probably really comfy and good for your feet but I can’t get over how perfect they would be for a Ronald McDonald cosplay 🤪

I used to think Canadian geese were a nuisance but then I realized they’re just the raccoons of the sky. Drinking dirty parking lot water out of pot holes and stealing food out of the trash. They’re cute. And terrifying.

EVIL - by D. Earl Stephens Look, I am not a religious man, and in fact have some serious issues with the Catholic Church…I will defend Catholics who take offense to it, though, because it is no doubt intentionally hurtful, which is the other thing the dead-inside Trump is effortlessly good …

Whistleblower Luis Elizondo Shows Fake UFO Photo Again The question now looms large: can Luis Elizondo be considered a credible voice in the ongoing UAP conversation? Hey now he’s just as credible as any other UFO guy (not very)

WATCH: Driver stops in middle of interstate, causes pile up Just a regular day on I-71 in Columbus, Ohio 🫤

Any time we get a severe thunderstorm warning in central Ohio it rains for like 10 minutes and then it’s done. I want a good storm dammit 🥱

I live 400 yards from Mark Zuckerberg’s massive data center Companies like Meta are a plague on society.

You know, sometimes I don’t even believe my backwards seasonal depression is real. Then suddenly it’s 80 degrees outside and I can’t even begin to comprehend how humanity has survived so long on this hell planet 🥵🔥

Your New Lunch Habit Is Hurting the Economy A society where you’re a broke piece of shit for Starbucks and Avocado Toast®️ but you’re killing the economy if you don’t eat fast food for lunch

Blue Origin Space Flight Backlash “I think that this space mission is confusing to people because seeing women and people of color in spaces like science and politics that have not previously included them feels and looks like…progress,” Emily Ratajkowski shared in a TikTok video that …

Digg.com Groundbreakers!: 

Finally just got invited to the new Digg.com “Groundbreakers” group!

I was so stoked when Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht did the reunion show for Diggnation last year. That was wild enough for me; I never thought I’d see the day. They joked about buying back Digg.com and making it an …

This little song is insanely motivational and I’m not easily motivated! It just sticks in your head and comes out whenever you don’t want to do something you definitely need to do 😋 Yoshi 2.0 - I do it anyway

Have you tried Quiche?: 

I haven’t had a whole lot of luck finding browsers I like on iPhone. It feels like every single third party browser is just a custom built version of Safari with a new skin and a few new features duct taped on.

That stripper thinks you're a real catch... : 

The thing that kills me about middle and lower middle class MAGA people is that it’s literally no different than thinking they’re the one guy who the stripper really fell head over heels for while they were throwing handfuls of $5’s at her.

Our 90 year old neighbor who feeds our outside cat stopped by and invited us to hang out some time. I’ve been listening to so much true crime I’m suspicious it’s all just a ploy to lure us to his torture dungeon lmao. Super sweet guy. But if I randomly quit posting you’ll …

My latest Metroidvania obsession: I really need to start paying attention to the devs behind the games I play. I started Sea of Stars, from Sabotage Studio, a while back and it’s one of the best classic style RPGs I’ve ever played. Then I got kinda sidetracked and found a new obsession with Metroidvanias like Blasphemous …

From r/MarchAgainstNazis

Elon Musk: ‘Tim Walz who is a huge jerk was running around on stage with the Tesla stock cut in half. He was overjoyed. What an evil thing to do. What a creep. What a jerk. Who derives joy from that?' Will someone please think of the oligarchs and government subsidized mega corporations‽ 🤪

Target foot traffic falls for seventh consecutive week For the latest week, Costco’s foot traffic gain was the near-inverse of Target’s loss: It was up 7%. I was never big on Target and I absolutely despise Walmart but the other half and I JUST got Costco memberships for the first time last month. …

Nintendo unveils Virtual Game Cards for the Switch for family sharing …when you buy a digital system of a game, it is loaded as a Virtual Game Card on a dedicated management screen. You can virtually load and eject your Virtual Game Cards. This will work for both the Nintendo Switch and …

NASA Drops Promise to Land “First Woman, Person of Color” on the Moon “A giant step back for womankind?”

I know I was being a little facetious when I said Elon is president, but damn Claude lol

A post about nicotine: 

I started smoking cigarettes when I was about 16 years old. My dad started when he was eight. His dad probably came out of the womb with an unfiltered Pall Mall hanging out of his mouth.

Picked up a R36S handheld emu: 

Picked up a R36S emulator console at a local video game place while my Switch was getting serviced last week.

Had to splurge a little with St. Patrick’s day coming up ☘️🍻

I’ll see a completely unhinged headline and almost start freaking out and then I’m like oh; that was all the way from yesterday, we’re already onto the next absolutely insane thing the oligarchy is cooking up

Swedish and Danish news not holding back [via Reddit]

The Return of Digg, a Star of Web 2.0 It was 2009. Ish. I had a modded original Xbox plugged into a 29" CRT TV sitting on top of a dresser in my bedroom. I used a content aggregator called Navi-X to stream everything from TV shows like Lost to random internet radio stations. I never missed a …

Well I guess the silver lining with Trump and Putin’s new romance is that it’s only a matter of time before he does something to piss Putin off and gets thrown out of a window 🤞

🔗 Kagi, search tips : Just 16 companies are responsible for the majority of the SEO enshittified websites that fill your search results with crap. You can use the Ublacklist extension to block them from appearing in Google or, better yet, use Kagi which can natively exclude them. …

Ohio Senate passes bill to change marijuana law The weed here is already overpriced garbage compared to Michigan. I guess they just wanna see all of the business go back there again O.o

I’ve been disconnecting and playing a lot of retro indie games lately. Faves so far have been: Sea of Stars Aggelos Dusk Warhammer 40k: Boltgun Annnd looking at Deltarune: Chapters 1 & 2 after I finish Sea of Stars. I think there’s a new chapter coming out sometime this year? …

Found on Reddit

Is Intel in trouble? How struggling chipmaker’s financial issues may impact Ohio factories Everyone hyped this up so much and now Intel is falling way behind schedule and generally doing terrible as a company lol things come to Ohio to die 💁

Just paid off the last of my credit card debt. I’ve been so stressed about it for so long I don’t think my nervous system has caught up to reality yet 😅 still feels like I have all these pointless bills that are going to wipe me out every couple weeks.

Stellantis Introduces Pop-Up Ads in Vehicles, Sparking Outrage Among Owners Here’s some stupid news that isn’t related to politics: pop up ads are coming to a vehicle near you! (It’s a Jeep thing)

Spider update: I haven’t posted a whole heck of a lot about my pinktoe tarantula since I got it. I’ve been working six days a week for what feels like an eternity, but I finally got a couple days off and I was able to hang out with the little guy for a bit. I mist the enclosure with a spray bottle …

Generic post about wanderlust: I regret that I haven’t traveled much so far. I’ve never been outside the United States. Hell, I’ve never even been to a blue state before. That didn’t even dawn on me until I started thinking about it just now. There is so much awesome culture around the world but for most …

Faith in karma: I’m not religious, but I have to believe some kind of karma exists out there. Even if it’s just the consequences of a few billionaires' shitty actions. Even the most gullible, brainwashed conservatives will eventually have to realize how bad they’re being fucked by their daddy in …

Tech Execs Plead for Great Firewall of America to Protect Them Against Scary Chinese AI Idk man, the more ‘merica tries to ban stuff from China the more I want to use it. Currently learning Mandarin and surfing Xaiohongshu daily 🤷

Russia is building an electronic registry of LGBTQ+ citizens …the Orwellian plan has been in discussion since last year after Russia’s Supreme Court outlawed the so-called “international LGBT movement” as an “extremist organization” at the urging of President Vladimir Putin. In the US, …

I used to like reading the news...: I’m a huge fan of RSS. It gives you complete control over how you get the news. It’s a perpetually updated stream of information hand-curated by you. It’s a neat little hobby coming up with the ultimate personalized news feed. No two are alike. Lately, it’s been pretty …

OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us Every few days I see something that makes me think we are living in the dumbest possible timeline.

Ohio AG Dave Yost to Costco: Drop your diversity programs or else Such blatant racism and homophobia. Shit like this is going on across the entire country. We are a fucking joke on the world stage.

Ohio Republicans want to make major changes to marijuana law approved by voters Conservatives are full of great ideas lol I have no problem going back to Michigan for cheaper, higher quality weed 🤷

Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Max challenges U.S. tech giants, reshapes enterprise AI Ope

Facebook flags Linux topics as ‘cybersecurity threats’ — posts and users being blocked | Tom’s Hardware I don’t even know what to say lol

Denmark to pump $2bn into Arctic security as Trump eyes Greenland Copenhagen announced on Monday that it will pump an additional 14.6 billion Danish crowns ($2.05bn) into security. The announcement came as the European country resists demands from United States President Donald Trump to hand over …

What is DeepSeek and why is it disrupting the AI sector? New AI from China is cheaper and more efficient than ChatGPT and actually open source. The company has attracted attention in global AI circles after writing in a paper last month that the training of DeepSeek-V3 required less than $6 million …

Every year or two I always get this urge to subscribe to our local newspaper. They do this promotion where you get six months for $0.99 and even that feels too expensive for how bad it is since Gannett took over.

The great (American?) firewall: I love that people are migrating from TikTok to Red Note in droves. Our oligarchy is banning TikTok under the guise of national security; never mind the fact that any American reading this post is likely doing so on a device manufactured in China. Never mind the fact that SHEIN and Temu are both …

Elon Musk is being sued by the feds over the way he bought Twitter - The Verge It’s hilarious that this is even a news story. Like as if it will have any repercussions whatsoever for Elon. It’s no different than how Jack Smith decided Trump is absolutely 100% responsible for the Jan 6th …

2024 Word of the Year Is “Rawdog” - American Dialect Society The verb rawdog is defined as “to undertake without usual protection, preparation, or comfort.” While the word originated as a vulgar slang term referring to having sex without a condom, rawdogging ended up crossing over into …

Prepare For A Whole Bunch Of Pointless, Harmful Mergers In Streaming By Media Executives All Out Of Original Ideas | Techdirt Crazy to think the golden age of streaming has already came and went before we even knew it. Now it’s all corporate mergers to make executives richer while regular …

Crypto Platforms Like Polymarket Now Taking Bets on Los Angeles Fire Devastation Wow crypto bros have hit a new low o.O

I’m not going to get any sleep tonight. I’m sitting here checking the weather like a giddy school kid hoping for a level three snow emergency so I get off work tomorrow 🤞

My new favorite drink 🤯 so tart and sour! I like the original Bubbles a lot too, it’s a Rosé cider but this is the most unique tasting cider I’ve ever had. Super good Ohio based craft beer company 🍻

A dumb week for Apple : We’re living in a surveillance state run by oligarchs, but the surveillance is mostly to serve you the finest targeted ads. We are in the dumbest possible timeline. I don’t know why I’m surprised about anything anymore lol 🔗 What to know about Apple’s $95 million settlement …

Feels like the anthem for 2025 - Time Hard by The Selecter

Thoughts on Kagi, The Assistant: 

I resubscribed to Kagi recently, only this time on the Ultimate plan with The Assistant.

I swore off of them for a while after the little bit of drama about integrating Brave Search, but who really gives a shit, you know? You gotta pick your battles. Separate the art from the artist.

I’ve been fighting this respiratory bug for the last month. It almost completely cleared up for about a week, then it came back full force. I decided I was going to urgent care today but they’re closed. Still had a great Xmas and managed to get pretty hammered for New Year’s Eve …

Clay Aiken says it was crucial to come out when he did even though he lost half his fans “It was the first decision I made as a father,” he said at the time. “I cannot raise a child to lie or to hide things. I wasn’t raised that way, and I’m not going to raise a child …

Retro vibes, pop culture and a little nostalgia : 

I was jamming to The Selecter this morning and it got me thinking…

Bands from the 80’s and earlier are a different breed than the pop stars of today. One obvious thing is the whole debate between analog vs digital recordings, vinyl vs cd’s and other digital formats.

Every time I walk in the room and make a little noise, this little tarantula runs and hides as far as he can under a piece of bark in back of the terrarium. I feel you little buddy <3

Bugs: a new year resolution: 

This might sound kinda silly but I think 2025 is the year of arthropods for me. I’ve always been squeamish around creepy crawly things but now I have this pet tarantula and a newfound obsession with raw honey.

MAGA civil war pits Ramaswamy and Musk vs Cernovich and Loomer in immigration fight Elon Musk’s X is the town square for the MAGA movement, and by stepping into that square and firmly criticizing American culture – while praising the immigrant work ethic and parenting model – …

Raw honey and concrete geese: 

This morning we went out to a local garden center in search of a concrete goose for the porch. But then we got there and they were closed for the holidays still, so we ended up stopping by some random flea market on the way back.

Holiday reflections: I’m writing this around 11pm on Christmas. I’m sick as a dog with a respiratory thing so I wasn’t able to go out with my partner to her parents house for the holiday stuff this year. Pretty bummed out about it! I got the spider from my stepdaughter (!) and my partner got me a …

So my daughter got me a pinktoe tarantula for Christmas! I’ve been watching this thing all day. Fed it a cricket last night and then transferred to its new enclosure when it was done. It’s mostly been hiding behind some bark since last night, but now it’s making a little web at the …

Headlights seem a lot brighter these days — because they are Although the human eye can adapt to a wide range of light from sunlight to darkness, it takes some time to adjust. Especially for aging eyes, LEDs can be too bright, too blue and too concentrated. This has been driving me absolutely …

I’ve had this cold so long I could start a whole blog reviewing different cough drops 😵‍💫

Then you really might know what it's like...: 

Working in the city you see a lot of homeless people begging for change at busy intersections. Some people avoid eye contact at all costs and practically peel out the split second the traffic light turns green, some people empathize and hand over a couple bucks when they can.

I'm STILL obsessed with Warp Terminal: 

I posted about this a few weeks ago but man Warp Terminal is a godsend. I know there’s plenty of debate around using AI for writing or generating silly little images, but Warp integrates it into the terminal SO WELL!

I’ve been dealing with a lot of issues with the Surface Linux kernel …

I’m still skeptical about the drone sightings around the country but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t intrigued 👀 I like Neil deGrasse Tyson’s tongue in cheek comment on whether or not they’re aliens: “I can’t claim to know the motives of aliens…but …

Thoughts on Meta and the TikTok ban: I get in at least a few hours of TikTok brainrot every week. It reminds me of Vine for the obvious reasons, only with a bunch of ads, sponsored posts and about the same amount of viral misinformation as Facebook: a metric fuckton. And as a bonus, both collect a nauseating amount of data from …

‘Malcolm in the Middle’ cast to reunite for new episodes Frankie Muniz, Bryan Cranston and Jane Kaczmarek are reuniting for a new four-episode run of “Malcolm in the Middle” for Disney+ — 25 years after the beloved sitcom first launched. I love this show. Who doesn’t? Hoping the …

Going back to Skyrim: I’ve never been a big gamer aside from cute Nintendo stuff. When Skyrim came out (what, like 12 or 13 years ago?) the most powerful hardware in my house was a 2011 MacBook Pro. Everyone was obsessed so I found a… not so legit copy with a janky Wine wrapper so I could play it on OS X, …

One day I’ll own a flannel that isn’t made out of polyester.

What makes a blog personal?: 

What are the rules? Do you have to choose between a travel log or daily journal entries? Or should you focus more on essays explaining your personal philosophies on life and the universe?

Will Luigi Mangione’s tipster get the $60K reward? It’s complicated …it’s not guaranteed that any one individual will get the full $60,000, especially considering taxes and the possibility of the reward being split between multiple people. NYPD officials said more than …

Drones over Jersey: 

There’s been a lot of buzz about swarms of drones over New Jersey. The government’s initial response was that they pose no threat and they don’t belong to our military or any foreign adversaries.

This Is How Political Violence Goes Mainstream Experts have different theories as to what’s driving this, but many agree that we’re due for more acts of political violence before the trend dissipates. The original title I saw in my RSS feed was “Luigi Mangione and the Era of Normie …

NBC News Does Entire Piece Trying To Link CEO Shooting To ‘Violent Video Game’ In the game, called “Among Us,” Only context you need 😂

The Onion’s Infowars Bid Gets Blocked In a statement, an attorney for the families told The New York Times that they “remain resilient and determined as ever to hold Alex Jones and his corrupt businesses accountable for the harm he has caused.” Alex Jones won’t be held accountable. …

Some days are just bad, and that's ok: I have this delusion where I feel like everyone should be happy all the time. That’s what I was chasing the better part of a decade ago when I was battling with addiction and it’s the illusion I put on every day as a salesguy. It’s not polite to tell people what you really think or …

‘Polarization’ is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: ‘Something everyone agrees on’ Oxford University chose brain rot and the Macquarie Dictionary picked enshittification. I’m noticing a trend here 🤔

More on echo chambers: 

It dawned on me today that the kind of people who criticize others for “living in an echo chamber” online are the kind of people who think everything should be ridiculed by anyone who disagrees, whether it’s right or wrong. The kind of people who bend first amendment rights to …

US Food and Drug Administration moves to ban red food dye Red 3 is used in nearly 3,000 different food products, according to a database by one environmental health group, including Pez, Peeps, Betty Crocker’s products and Dubble Bubble chewing gum. Like other food dyes, it adds nothing of …

Mariah Carey Denies That Her Holiday Video Is AI Slop, But We’re Not Convinced, for Obvious Reasons The video…immediately felt off: the diva’s lips didn’t match up with her words, she was swaying strangely, and her perfectly-coiffed blonde hair was moving in peculiar ways. …

New obsession: I got this box of natural gum the other day. It’s made with organic xylitol, chicle gum, spruce gum and a bunch of other organic ingredients that come from tree saps. I like the natural piney flavor and it’s supposedly really good for your teeth. Trees have so much to …

‘Hawk Tuah’ Creator Haliey Welch Criticized For Memecoin Launch After Price Crashes I wondered why “hawk tuah” was trending across social media again. I didn’t even read this article; the title says it all. Literally every cryptocurrency ‘project’ follows the same …

You know, Micro.blog’s comment system has its quirks, but it’s by far my favorite. It’s so true to the social web with how you can comment on Micro.blog, Mastodon or Bluesky. Those are the only social networks I really care about and they’re all able to comment on my blog …

Want to Try Tab Groups in Firefox? Here’s How if you have upgraded to Firefox 133 you can manually enable tab groups to try it out. Just keep in mind it’s not enabled by default for a very good reason: it’s not finished! I’ve wanted this for SO LONG. Might have to switch …

No, Trump Didn’t Nominate El Chapo as US Ambassador to Mexico The fact that Snopes.com even felt the need to post this says a lot about the state of things 😅

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is much better without microtransactions The original Pocket Camp has technically shut down, replaced by Pocket Camp Complete, which gets rid of all the in-app purchases in exchange for a one-time fee. Love this! The microtransactions are the reason I couldn’t …

I just sent a huge paragraph to Google’s feedback form at the bottom of the search results. I asked it very specifically to pull up an article on something I was having trouble finding. I thought it was an AI search box lmao that’s going to be some very confusing feedback for someone …

Meta says it’s mistakenly removing too many posts He said the company regrets aggressively removing posts about the COVID-19 pandemic. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee the decision was influenced by pressure from the Biden administration. I assume he …

Here’s a fun link: everyone Donald Trump pardoned between 2017 and 2021. But yeah; the Hunter Biden thing is a TRAVESTY 🙄

This New Microsoft 365 Attack Can Break Through Your 2FA The Rockstar 2FA phishing kit is a unique set of malicious tools that cybercriminals can purchase on the black market for $200. This kit gives the criminals everything they need to break into someone’s Microsoft 365 account, even if …

Biden’s Unpardonable Hypocrisy The president vowed not to pardon his son Hunter—and then did so anyway. What a stupid article from The Atlantic. A willingness to evade the rule of law is the foundation of Donald Trump’s entire career in business and politics, not a nepotistic …

What is Brain rot, the Oxford University 2024 word of the year? Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok? If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year. Sounds about right. The Macquarie Dictionary in Australia picked …

About those UFOs over DC...: 

The UFOs over the the US Capitol definitely contain artifacts, just not alien artifacts.

Our house tried to kill us: 

We’ve had this water leak coming from our furnace for probably a month or two. It was just a slow drip at first, so we didn’t notice it right away. I figured it might have been something simple like the humidifier clogging up and not draining properly.

I love when some random person follows me on social media and they have a blog linked in their bio. There’s so much out there you’d never find otherwise. This is the good deep web.

The indie web is crucial for me right now: 

When I started blogging earlier this year I wrote a lot about the indie web. The social web, small web, or even the IndieWeb, if you’d like.

What Breaking Up Google’s Search Monopoly Could Do to AI Making it harder for Google to give its own products preferential treatment might not actually drive people away from the company’s search engine–but it could make them second-guess Gemini. Good! Gemini is still terrible. The …

Being a skeptic is boring: 

Last night my partner and I got into a silly little debate about ghosts. Earlier that day, we watched the Demon House documentary and then followed up in the evening with a Netflix movie based on the same story: The Deliverance.

Small scale is the best scale – Manu I can’t help myself thinking that I’m getting to the point where the bigger you are the more unappealing you become to my eyes. And that’s true not just for social media platforms but for creators and personalities in general. I’m an absolute nobody …

I hate holiday get togethers. When I was younger I was more rebellious and just skipped them. I don’t know exactly when or why I started going back. One thing’s for sure though, they always make me appreciate my own family a lot more. That’s what I’m thankful for this year: …

Walmart made a whole Christmas movie just to sell you stuff Walmart is linking up with Roku to release a full-length Christmas movie that will let viewers buy products on their TV during specific parts of the story The film is titled Jingle Bell Love and stars Joey McIntyre, a member of the boy …

I’ve been on Bluesky a lot lately because I’m a sucker for riding hype trains but Micro.blog still blows my mind daily. It’s kind of brutalist isn’t it? No likes or reposts, or follower counts, just a feed and a blog. I like brutalism.

Elusive deer spotted wearing high-vis jacket in Canada: ‘Who is responsible?’ I, for one, think it’s great the deer are taking traffic safety more seriously.

Mark Zuckerberg meets Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago “Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration.” Well I guess the foreseeable future was about two months, eh? After facing significant …

Orcas start wearing dead salmon hats again after ditching the trend for 37 years Orcas off the coast of Washington State are balancing dead fish on their heads like it’s the 1980s, but researchers still aren’t sure why they do it. I love these guys. They’re just as intelligent as …

Ohio governor signs bill limiting bathroom use by transgender students I fucking hate this. We’re making leaps and bounds in the wrong direction. Fuck DeWine.

I recently switched from namecheap to name.com for my domains. Transferred out of Micro.blog just because, and it was INSTANT since that’s what MB uses for domains purchased here. No fee either! Their dash is a lot cleaner and less cluttered, I’m really digging that too.

Cranberry Bogs Use Spiders Instead Of Pesticides You see, cranberry farms have been moving towards more organic farming methods which preclude the use of pesticides and so to keep the insect population down, the farmers encourage wolf spiders to live in the bogs. I’m not particularly… …

Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for ‘Machine Learning Research’ The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID…It’s also noteworthy that it’s a “snapshot” of time on …

‘Enshittification’ Is Officially the Biggest Word of the Year 2024 will go down in history as the year humanity managed to enshittify the entire planet.

Elon Musk wants to block the transfer of InfoWars' X accounts to The Onion Musk’s lawyers now claim that users don’t actually own their profiles on the supposed “free speech platform.” Of course not. That’s why corporate social media is terrible. Granted, it’s usually the other way …

UK and Irish retailers pull products associated with Conor McGregor Lucky for him the US loves rapists. His bottom shelf hooch will continue to do just fine over here. Hell, he might even get nominated for a Cabinet position. Update: Ope, maybe not! Conor McGregor dumped by Proper No. Twelve …

USSR: The United States of Sudden Regression: I was in the middle of writing this post about how, pretty much until the middle of the 20th century, people took the law into their own hands if they saw fit. And they probably got away with it too. Like this photo I saw on Reddit: That’s a feel good ACAB justice kinda story, right? I’m …

I subscribed to the print editions of a couple websites I like recently. Magazines are such a cool nostalgic experience. The original adhd doomscrolling device, in the flesh.

Elon Musk Muses About Buying MSNBC: “How Much Does It Cost?” The billionaire and buddy to the president-elect jokes about buying the liberal network. At least we think he’s joking. His acquisition of Twitter started out as a joke too. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t at least make …

Would you live on a cruise ship for four years to escape the Trump presidency? If only I had a cool $160,000 to secure a spot

Microsoft is testing a new in-game browser Doing what they can to get people to switch to Internet Explorer Edge 😏

You deserve a better browser than Google Chrome If you’ve been using Chrome because it came as the default browser on your phone, you might want to try something new. If you’ve been using Chrome for 15 years because it was so innovative when it was introduced, that’s no longer the case, and you …

I like that Feedbin uses the same key commands as Nethack

I really like Reeder 5 on iOS but I use Linux on my desktop so I’ve been constantly syncing OPML files between that and different web based RSS readers. I used Inoreader for a couple years but it’s so expensive for something that constantly suggests features to try and upsell you to the …

Gaetz withdraws from consideration for Trump’s attorney general role “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I’ll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General,” Gaetz wrote. Whoa he really doesn’t want that report to come …

‘Black mold-like substance’ and water contamination uncovered by FDA at Tom’s of Maine toothpaste factory The FDA’s inspection took place in May, and Tom’s of Maine responded to its initial results in June. The FDA’s latest letter declares that the …

T-Mobile actually stopped some hackers from stealing customer data T-Mobile detected suspicious activity in a recent attempt to access customer data and kicked the cyber criminals out before they were able to infiltrate deeper levels of the network. Well now I’ve seen everything 🙃

The fight for Alex Jones' Infowars company heats up as Jones sues to hold on I knew he wouldn’t go down without a fight. He’s just prolonging the inevitable, but he’s going to be as difficult and obnoxious as possible in the meantime.

Magnetic North Pole moves closer to Russia in a way scientists have never seen before What a headline 😆 From 1600 to 1990, it is estimated to have moved about 10-15km a year. In the early 2000s, it sped up to around 55km a year…In the past five years, the magnetic north pole has …

RFK Jr. Told a Bunch of People the Government May Have “Planned” COVID “Many people argue that this pandemic was a ‘plandemic,’ that it was planned from the outset, it’s part of a sinister scheme. I can’t tell you the answer to that. I don’t have enough evidence. A lot of it feels very planned to …

So about those MrBeast allegations...: 

A few months ago I wrote about the drama surrounding MrBeast and his former co-star Ava Tyson.

I'm obsessed with this terminal emulator: Never thought I’d feel so strongly about a terminal app but I’ve been obsessed with Warp Terminal for the last week. It has built in AI so you can use natural language when you don’t know where to go next. I wish they had this kind of thing circa 2009 when I installed Ubuntu on my …

The majority of news influencers are conservative men, study finds This morning, The Pew Research Center…published a deep 122 page report that found that the news influencer landscape skews male and leans disproportionately conservative, creating a concerning imbalance in our online news …

“The older I get the more conservative I get” aka switched from a rapid release distro to Debian with Firefox ESR. It’s all so stable 🥲

Scientists Discover ‘Immortal’ Marine Creature That Can ‘Time Travel’ I’ve been a broken record on the sea aliens lately but this is pretty cool, and actually real.

I like my cozy little echo chamber: 

I try to live in an echo chamber. I’m not into debates. I’m not a fan of confrontation at all, really. Some people thrive on it, I shut down and retreat into a sweaty shell.

When I’m reading an article or watching the news, while I do follow a lot of centrist sources, I try to …

The US is a silly place. People will happily vote into office a guy who’s a convicted felon, rapist and white nationalist but all of that’s just fake news. Then a few conspiracy theorists who used to work for the government go in front of congress with no tangible evidence of anything …

The Onion, InfoWars shenanigans: One [bid] was from the Jones-affiliated First United American Companies, which offered $3.5 million, the trustee revealed in court Thursday. The other, from The Onion, was lower but contained an incentive by some of the Sandy Hook families to forgo a portion of the sale proceeds and give it to other …

Unreal Gold and Unreal Tournament are now free on the Internet Archive An Epic spokesperson subsequently confirmed that it has given the green light for the games to be hosted on the Internet Archive, telling PC Gamer, “We can confirm that Unreal 1 and Unreal Tournament are available on …

Mountain lions in Los Angeles become night owls to avoid humans Not a bad idea, honestly…

Re: Massive New Information on Aliens Just Came Out (penguinz0, YouTube): I like Charlie’s take on this. Yes; I believe all of the people at the congressional hearing on UAPs were telling the truth, I just don’t think it means aliens. Whether they think so or not. There’s proof of strange craft flying around the skies and we don’t know who they …

Bluesky feels more like old Twitter than X does I’ll go as far as saying it feels more like original Twitter than Mastodon, too. I don’t know what it is, like I was on mastodon for two years before Bluesky came out and I had already built a pretty nice little community over there. But …

Here’s Why I Decided To Buy ‘InfoWars’ - The Onion This is perfect. InfoWars makes much more sense as satire.

Mark ‘Z-Pain’ Zuckerberg did a cover of ‘Get Low.’ I may be scarred for life after hearing Zuckerberg’s autotuned voice serenade me with “‘Til the sweat drop down my balls.” “‘Get Low’ was playing when I first met Priscilla at a college party, so every …

I only watched like 20 minutes of that UAP congressional hearing but I think I can summarize most of it: whistleblower: we have reason to believe that UAP’s are real and may be alien craft someone in congress: do you have any proof? whistleblower: well OBviously I have proof but I can’t …

Perplexity brings ads to its platform Enshittification ensues

AI Chatbot Added to Mushroom Foraging Facebook Group Immediately Gives Tips for Cooking Dangerous Mushroom This is what natural selection looks like in the age of gen AI

Daring Fireball: 1Password: The Infinite Loop of Security The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that “the human element” (accidental breaches caused by human error, or victimization in phishing attacks and the like) was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true …

Election Conspiracy Theories Are for Everyone In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and …

iPhone text prediction is so bad I think our only option at this point is to rewrite the entire English language to better align with how autocorrect wants us to talk.

Beatles' ‘Now and Then’ Makes History As First AI-Assisted Song To Earn Grammy Nomination many fans assumed that the remaining Fab Four members…must have used generative AI to deepfake the late John Lennon. That was not actually the case. Instead, the Beatles used a form of AI …

Your Standing Desk Might Actually Be as Bad as Sitting All Day …a new study from researchers in Australia and the Netherlands has found standing for long periods of time might not be much better than sitting after all – and actually comes with its own life-threatening risks. Ahmadi says …

How to work at McDonald’s and still become a millionaire “Every dollar I get, I’m taking some of that money and I’m going to put it over here so that I can own my time and eventually have that money fund my entire life.” This is so dumb lol idk why I’m even sharing it. Winning the …

I just bought the domain name worksucks.me. I think I’m going to start working on a silly little thing like Fesshole only instead of random confessions you can anonymously submit a post bitching about your job. No idea if it’ll ever come to fruition but I need something to tinker with. …

This scientist treated her own cancer with viruses she grew in the lab She chose to target her tumour with two different viruses consecutively — a measles virus followed by a vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV). Both pathogens are known to infect the type of cell from which her tumour originated, and …

Taylor Swift Fans Are Leaving X for Bluesky After Trump’s Election “I think that’s the kind of rhetoric we want to get away from,” Kim says. She also notes that X’s recent update to the “block” feature, which allows people to see the profile and posts of users that have blocked them, has …

It's like seeing a car crash from inside the car The driver's got his head craned back he's telling you a joke You see the bus on collision course You point your arm and turn your head and wait for the impact This is the feeling we learn to live with in North America The morning headlines always …

Indie web escapism: Back in 2016 I didn’t have this community. I had Twitter and I think Tumblr? And definitely Facebook. Facebook is already a shitshow. People fighting and ending lifetime friendships, a few Trump supporters being schooled on what tariffs actually are even though it’s a little too late …

Trump plans to dismantle Biden AI safeguards after victory Biden’s order established wide-ranging oversight of AI development. Among its core provisions, the order established the US AI Safety Institute (AISI) and lays out requirements for companies to submit reports about AI training …

I’m so fucking dazed I should probably try to wait at least 24 hours before posting anything. This shit is unreal.

I’m watching so many screens 😵‍💫 every election year I feel like I work for a 24 hour news network

Just got back from the polling station. Judging by the turnout of the early voters here I thought it would be packed but there was almost no one there. I was in and out in 10 minutes! Next step is obsessing over the TV until they announce that they won’t be able to announce the results …

‘The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet’ Has Finally Been Identified It’s been an incredible year for solving long-running internet mysteries. In May, investigators tracked down “The Backrooms” and in September investigators identified “Celebrity Number Six.” Now it seems that The …

Perplexity CEO offers AI company’s services to replace striking NYT staff “Hundreds of millions of people are depending on The Times’s journalism on Election Day and afterward, and it is troubling that the Tech Guild would try to block this public service at such a consequential moment for …

Thousands of People Are Cloning Their Dead Pets. This Is the Woman They Call First It had taken seven months and cost $50,000, but that cat was one of the first pets to be commercially cloned in the United States. Since then, a couple thousand dog, cat, and horse clones have followed, and every …

Inspiration from Dr. Hoby Wedler - your non-visual sensory guide to the best things in life: I’ve been watching this TikTok page for a couple months and it’s been such an inspiration. Super sweet down to earth guy who laughed in the face of adversity and got his PhD in chemistry, in spite of people telling him it would never work. This video is my favorite. He talks about using …

USPol: Election woes: 

I’ve been pretty quiet across social media and my blog the last few days. This close to the election, nothing else seems very significant. A week from now could be the beginning of the end or a new beginning entirely. I’ve never been so nervous about an election in my life.

Nintendo made a music streaming app for Switch Online subscribers It’s like Apple Music Classical but for Nintendo games App Store | Google Play

I love me some Irish whiskey 🍻

Some (Slightly Biased) Thoughts On The State Of Decentralized Social Media | Techdirt I’m enthusiastic about Bluesky’s approach. I think the ATProtocol gives us the best chance of reaching that breakthrough. But I’m happy to see others trying different ideas as well, because all of these …

These hornets break down alcohol so fast that they can’t get drunk “To the best of our knowledge, Oriental hornets are the only animal in nature adapted to consuming alcohol as a metabolic fuel," said co-author Eran Levin of Tel Aviv University. “They show no signs of intoxication or …

Power-sucking GenAI set to create mountain of e-waste The study…indicates potential for rapid growth of e-waste from 2.6 kilotons each year in 2023 to between 400 kilotons and 2.5 million tons each year in 2030, when no waste reduction measures are considered. AI can do some really amazing …

I Don’t Know Why Women Keep Laughing at Me When I’m Out Driving my Tesla Cybertruck I was taking a right turn out of a convenience store driveway the other day, waiting for the traffic to go by, and noticed the driver, a female, was apparently laughing hysterically at my truck…Then today, I …

We can Terraform the American West – Casey Handmer’s blog I like this. Terraform Earth before we terraform Mars.

I’ve had AppleCare on this iPhone for almost a year and haven’t had to use it. I think it’s time to get my money’s worth and stop using a case

The fediverse is getting its own TikTok competitor called Loops Loops…was developed by Daniel Supernault, who also created the federated Instagram rival Pixelfed. In fact, Loops will run under the Pixelfed project, according to an FAQ on its website. This looks pretty cool! I registered an …

Haven’t seen a customer all day. I just ordered some lunch so I’m sure I’ll get busy as soon as I sit down to eat. I think this is what they mean by “you have to spend money to make money”

Disposable vapes to be banned in England and Wales from June Single-use vapes are difficult to recycle and typically end up in landfill, where their batteries can leak harmful waste like battery acid, lithium, and mercury into the environment, the government said. This is my biggest concern with …

Any time I see bright but subtle gradients in web design it gives me flashbacks of sticking a magnet to an old CRT monitor

A Quarter of Smartphone Owners Are Unimpressed by AI The biggest motivation for US adult smartphone owners to upgrade their devices is longer battery life (61%), followed by more storage (46%) and better camera features (38%). Just 18% say their main motivator is AI integrations. AI can do some …

Take two: giving Kagi another shot: 

A while back I tried out Kagi Search for a few months. It was a nice change of pace from Google, which is almost completely useless these days, and DuckDuckGo which is essentially privacy enhanced Bing.

You ever publish something in the middle of the night when it’s nowhere close to ready? Yeah, haha me neither 🥴

The amount of claims labeled satire that snopes.com even has to publish really puts the state of big social media into perspective

iOS 18.2 will let everyone set new default phone and messaging apps …a note on Apple’s developer website states that all users worldwide can set new default apps for calling and messaging in iOS 18.2 But the big stuff, like support for alternative app stores and browser engines, has mostly …

We need each other : 

People, I mean.

I’ve always considered myself a bit of a loner. Definitely an introvert; I love hanging out with friends but I love coming home and decompressing while watching some TV or spinning a few records even more. My nights of staying at the bar until 2am and passing out at a …

Recurring Strangers: 

So far, I’ve lived most of my life in a small town. My graduating class was about 120 people; it’s definitely one of those communities where everyone knows everyone else. It’s the kind of place where you feel like you’re in a decent sized city for about five minutes and then, …

The Micro.blog browser extension is super handy for bookmarking articles. I’ve been using it like a read later service for a while now and I noticed I’ve never really seen it mentioned anywhere. Really convenient for sharing links between my iPhone and Linux desktop Firefox | Chrome

Starting out on Micro.blog after using regular social media for years is like going through digital detox. At first it’s quiet and feels pointless because you aren’t getting internet points, then next thing you know you’re annoyed that you can’t turn all of that stuff off …

I know LLMs hallucinate but Google’s AI is straight up Hallucination as a Service 😆

Mini rant about Meta, staying in touch: It’s annoying that Facebook is the only way for anyone to get in touch with extended family or old friends. Idk of any other platform where literally everyone has an account. I log into the mobile web version every few weeks and it notifies me of new messages but then it makes me install …

‘Jersey Shore’ Airs as ‘Macaroni Rascals’ in Japan? | Snopes.com The Japanese translation of “Jersey Shore” is more nuanced than the meme suggests, but the core of the claim holds up. When the Japanese title, “マカロニ野郎のニュージャージーライフ,” is translated to …

Conservatives tried to start a boycott of LGBTQ+ friendly businesses. Their efforts backfired. Several small business owners in Lancaster, Ohio, say they saw an increase in new customers after a local anti-LGBTQ+ group tried to start a boycott campaign against them. I work in Lancaster every once …

Warm take on federated social media: 

The stuff you’ve already heard a million times

Mastodon is a decentralized social network, meaning anyone can download it and run their own instance. Each instance can federate with each other, so it still feels like one massive social network. The benefit is that there’s no single point …

The Legend of Zelda: Parallel Worlds I was reading a post by Toxicka Shock about this disturbing homebrew Gameboy ROM this morning: One of the great unsung stories of video gaming in the 2010s was the explosion of high quality homebrew releases. The success of games like Undertale and Cave Story …

Autopsy of 78-year-old man reveals he had three penises Interestingly, it appears the urethra first grew within the secondary penis but failed to entirely develop there, forcing it to change its route and grow through what became the primary penis. Because of this internal arrangement, medical …

I’m not a programmer but I think our diy monolithic point of sales/literally everything to do with the company software that stores everything in excel spreadsheets and gets beamed out to a bunch of Windows 7 thin clients is probably not the greatest or most secure way to do business

Putting yourself out there: on self doubt, persistence : 

Being any kind of creator is mentally taxing at times. Publicly posting a story, a song, or a video you recorded is a double edged sword. It can be the biggest reward or the biggest source of anxiety. Sometimes it’s a little of both. It’s nerve racking putting yourself out there.

I’ve been using the new Reeder for a while now. Started back when it was TestFlight only and then bought the one year subscription when it was out of beta. It’s really polished and well done but I think I prefer having seperete apps for my feeds and social media. It’s too much …

Man blames bellyache on street food — but no, it’s a live cockroach Cockroaches are known as hearty insects that can survive just about anything: sewers, decapitation, radiation after a nuclear war. And to prove the point, one cockroach was just spotted alive and well while wreaking havoc …

BlueSky knocked offline after mass exodus from Elon Musk’s site Elon Musk, X’s owner, announced that the site would be changing how its “block” button works. That option previously allowed users to hide their profile from certain accounts – but will no longer do so. “One of the biggest functions …

My favorite things about omg.lol so far have definitely been the community itself and the little statuslog thing you can embed. I scrapped the idea of starting another blog over there just for the sake of starting another blog. Although I do like how it’s all set up. But Micro.blog already …

Jerry Seinfeld No Longer Believes the “Extreme Left” Is Ruining Comedy “I did an interview with The New Yorker, and I said that the extreme left has suppressed the art of comedy,” Seinfeld said. “I did say that. That’s not true." “Does culture change, and are there things I used to say that …

Micro.blog and the Tiny Theme are a powerful combination

7/11’s seltzer water is much cuter than Liquid Death

Maybe It Should Be Illegal To Instantly Delete A Website’s Archives - Aftermath A few months ago GameStop wiped Game Informer off the face of the earth without notice. This kinda thing is why the Internet Archive is so important.

How Digg helped invent the social internet So many of Digg’s features, from its voting mechanism to its commenting system to its occasional teeming toxicity, are omnipresent on the internet now. But in 2004, when Kevin Rose was working on the first versions of his new news platform — back when he …

One personal website is enough for me – disassociated.com Not everyone wants to post content on social media though. In that case then, I can see the point of something like Micro.blog. I don’t know a whole lot about the platform, but it seems similar to the likes of Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky: …

What makes WP Engine different from Bluehost?: This might sound dumb but I don’t get the difference between something like WP Engine and other hosts that specialize in Wordpress, like Bluehost which literally refers to itself as a Wordpress Hosting Platform and Dreamhost, both of which are recommended by Automattic? I get that they have …

I’m pretty good at starting a post, going off on a tangent and then forgetting what I was even writing about in the first place

I was originally planning on making my root domain a static landing page/hub kinda thing but I changed it back to my Micro.blog site since I’m most active here. Instead of an about page, I added a link in my nav to the “hub” subdomain where my socials, bio and a longform blog live …

I really liked this video essay. The author draws parallels between simulation theory and our always connected, perpetually online world.

I still think about that time Jack Dorsey called everyone on Bluesky “Very, very common” Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people …

DOODAD.dev - a sick pattern generator for web design Tools for making websites fast, accessible, expressive, and green. These tools are mostly for helping web developers build small websites (sites that use fewer bytes) without sacrificing expression. I randomly stumbled across this a few minutes …

What's valuable to you?: 

I was just reading this Reddit thread about a blogging platform that launched a few years ago. It's grown into a successful space with a thriving community by now, but the comments were kind of cracking me up.

The #1 thing people were focused on back then was how to monetize it.

There's no built-in …

WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin WordPress.org has taken over a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced today. Wow that must be pretty …

Rumors on X Are Becoming the Right’s New Reality A curious set of claims has recently emerged from…X: FEMA is systematically abandoning Trump-supporting Hurricane Helene victims; Democrats (and perhaps Jewish people) are manipulating the weather; Haitian immigrants are eating pet cats in …

SSRI Withdrawal, Brain Zaps [psychiatrist.com]: In SSRI Withdrawal, Brain Zaps Go from Overlooked Symptom to Center Stage A sensation unofficially known as “brain zaps” has caused concern in patients stepping off of their SSRIs. Until recently, physicians have widely been unaware or dismissive of the symptom.  “There was an emphasis both …

Why even come out if you're bi or pan?: 

I've heard that a lot. Why would I even come out of the closet when I can pass for a straight guy? Just date girls and spank it to gay porn or something; don't do this shit in public.

WordPress Alternatives Due to…everything going on right now with WordPress, I thought I’d put together a list of alternative CMSs that better fit the criteria someone might have for their website … The criteria for this list are “Can it be downloaded, dropped onto a …

A deposit of marine fossils found under San Pedro High School - Los Angeles Times Researchers uncovered two distinct sites on campus where new buildings were under construction: a bone bed dating back 8.7 million years in the Miocene era and a shell bed about 120,000 years old from the Pleistocene …

I like the brutalist feel of omg.lol 😌

Internet Archive hacked, data breach impacts 31 million users “Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!,” reads a JavaScript alert shown on the …

Elon Musk’s ‘Free’ Starlink for Hurricane Helene Victims Will Cost at Least $400 Musk made headlines with a promise that SpaceX Starlink would be free for 30 days to help in places where fiber and cellular infrastructure might have been knocked offline. …anyone interested …

Seasonal euphoria: 

I'm wired backwards--or at least my seasonal depression is. I'm at my best when it's 20°F and everything's covered with a fluffy blanket of glimmering snow. I can sleep under a comforter without waking up soaked in sweat. I can actually enjoy a hot shower and it doesn't take me three hours to cool …

CTV industry’s unprecedented “surveillance” - Ars Technica Not only does CTV operate in ways that are unfair to consumers, it is also putting them and their families at risk as it gathers and uses sensitive data about health, children, race, and political interests …buying a smart TV set …

Progress in the middle of nowhere, Ohio: I just re-watched this old video of someone driving around filming my hometown with a camcorder in the 80's. It's unbelievable how much it's changed even since the first time I watched it a decade ago. I want to record my own. Intel and a few other big tech companies are setting up shop about 15 …

I’m always a little overwhelmed switching DNS records around and changing the design of stuff but it’s exciting too. Gives me a little project to work through and keep me occupied for a while. It gets boring after a while when everything works perfect and there’s nothing to do but …

Started restructuring my site and messing around with DNS settings again. Stuff might be a little wonky until I get that all sorted out o.O

The saddest advice I've ever gotten: 

When we were in our teen years my cousin and I started writing a bunch of music. He'd been playing guitar since he was like five years old so he was kind of a prodigy at that point. He's one of those people who can hear something and immediately tell you what tuning it's in and then start playing it …

You can never have too many markdown editors

You know what I hate about YouTube’s algorithm? Any time you hit the Back button or end up on the home page after watching something, it populates with videos and after three or four seconds it re-loads the entire page with different videos. You will never find the one you were about to watch …

Kyle Rittenhouse Metal Fest Booking Causes Bands to Drop Out Shell Shock founder and CEO, Tyler Hoover: The lynch mob here to take down Shell Shock will not win. It doesn’t matter, because guess what? You can’t kill spirit. You can’t kill punk. And you can’t fucking kill …

I thought I would dive into omg.lol a lot quicker but I think it’s going to be one of those weekend project kinda things. I’m not sure what vision I have for it at the moment, if any. I like it a lot though. Too much not to set something up there. I just have to figure out what …

159 employees are leaving Automattic as CEO’s fight with WP Engine escalates | TechCrunch Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg said on Thursday that 159 employees (roughly 8.4% of staff) accepted a severance package that the company had offered to those who disagreed with his direction of WordPress …

Mark Zuckerberg’s rebrand is a master class in distraction Zuckerberg has started working out, changed his hairstyle, and is wearing gold chains, but most importantly, he’s given up on trying to seriously respond to his critics. Ever since the Trump presidency people like Musk and Zuck have …

Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: 

Zelda 3, or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has been my favorite installment in the Zelda series for as long as I can remember.

I like being able to put my icons wherever I want on iOS 18 but it’s a nightmare trying to reorganize them sometimes 😵‍💫

Started watching Uzumaki: Spiral Into Horror on Max A town of people slowly go insane over increasing obsessions with spiral shapes: patterns in the clouds, everyday objects, hair, insects, skin.

Nintendo Targets YouTube Accounts Showing Emulated Games Recent laws in Japan have criminalized console and game modding, as well as save file editing. YouTubers such as PointCrow have reported takedowns of their videos featuring modded gameplay. Content creators are now more hesitant to …

Gun-toting Nazis tried to ruin a Pride festival. They failed miserably. The organizers of a Pride festival in Grove City, Ohio refused to let hate win when a group of gun-toting Neo-Nazis attempted to ruin the day. This is near where I live. They were there for like 20 minutes looking like a bunch …

Currently reading: The Trouble with Being Born by E. M. Cioran 📚

The Bravery of Being Out of Range: Reading about the invasion of Lebanon today immediately made me hear Roger Waters' The Bravery of Being Out of Range in the back of my mind: Hey bartender - over here! Two more shots and two more beers. Sir, turn up the TV sound, the war has started on the ground! Just love those laser-guided …

Sending Children Through the US Postal Service in the 1910s The children had to meet specific criteria: they had to weigh less than 50 pounds, which was roughly the weight limit for postal packages at the time. Their parents or guardians would affix postage stamps to their clothing as a form of …

Jeremy Clarkson Says All Modern Cars ‘Are Sh*t’ Jeremy Clarkson has been known for his often controversial takes on cars. Well, he’s got another one: modern cars are “all shit now.” Clarkson said this during a watch party for the final episode of “The Grand Tour” Clarkson isn’t alone in this …

We’ve been on this Irish whiskey kick for a while. Out of everything we’ve tried, this stuff is the cheapest by far and also the smoothest. It’s my new favorite ❤️🍻

I started using the Bear notes app on iPhone but I run Linux everywhere else so I still needed a good markdown editor for my laptop. Enter Apostrophe. Looks beautiful on my GNOME desktop and it’s just as minimal and simple as Bear. So many great alternatives on Linux 🐧

I broke up with my weed dealer: 

When the first dispensaries opened up shop for recreational sales in Ohio, I felt like a kid in a candy shop. Then I looked at the prices.

OpenAI might raise the price of ChatGPT to $44 by 2029 OpenAI could face a blowback if it increases prices too quickly. While ChatGPT has roughly 10 million paying users today, surveys suggest that many believe the current $20-per-month price is too high. Personally I think $20 is already too high …

I’m obsessed with Rick and Morty: The Anime. I’m not big on anime, maybe it’s the complete disconnect from the original creators or just the fact that it’s a parallel storyline but it’s such a good series

From Lemmy It’s coming 😬

Birthday Weather Enter your birth date and place to discover what the weather was like when you were born! This is neat. It was rainy with a high of 85.8°F when I was born source

U.S. Court Orders LibGen to Pay $30m to Publishers …LibGen is one of the longest-running shadow libraries online. In recent years, rightsholders have made several attempts to shut the site down. Court orders have led to LibGen being blocked in several countries, but completely eliminating …

Okay I'm finally using Bear: 

Not Bear Blog, but the markdown app. I used Obsidian for a while and I really liked it, but it felt like overkill so I switched to Drafts. I kinda liked that too but it also felt a little bloated after a while, mostly because it integrates with so many other services. Literally the only feature I …

A rant about Facebook: 

You know what I hate about Facebook? It’s the only social network where literally everyone you know has an account. It’s one of those things that’s become a simple fact of life and no one ever questions it. If you take a step back it’s pretty crazy though right? We preach …

Google’s AI Mushrooms Could Have ‘Devastating Consequences’ Google is serving AI-generated images of mushrooms when users search for some species, a risky and potentially fatal error for foragers who are trying to figure out what mushrooms are safe to eat.  I would trust a dusty …

I was always more of a Courtney Love fan. She gets blamed for Kurt’s death with no tangible evidence but Dave Grohl and the AIDS denialist garbage he pushes is directly responsible for thousands of deaths

WP Engine sends cease and desist to Automattic The plot thickens 👀

I’ve always been one of those people who use ‘lol’ too much but I’m also one of those people who laugh too much in real life. My awkward and excessive laughing falls somewhere between Kitty Forman and Kamala Harris, I think.

This is the only website I’ve ever found where people are as excited about fonts as I am lol

Start auditing and controlling the AI models accessing your content I don’t use Cloudflare anymore but I think this is pretty cool. They have a new thing where you can filter and block AI crawlers and even, somehow… charge them for the data you allow them to use? Site owners will have …

Caffeinated ramen in a squeeze tube… Boost Noodle is a new kind of ramen for players who “want to eat easily with one hand while playing games,““not get their expensive and important gaming equipment dirty,” and “want to eat something closer to a meal rather …

A Bay Area boy was kidnapped from a park in 1951. He’s just been found alive. Whoa. You always hear about cold cases like this but never ones where they actually find them

Researcher reveals ‘catastrophic’ security flaw in the Arc browser Arc has a feature called Boosts that allows you to customize any website with custom CSS and Javascript. Unfortunately our Firebase ACLs were misconfigured…This allowed any Boost to be assigned to any user …

Squid Game Season 2’s First Clip Brings Bullets, Fire, and Fresh Meat Netflix has shared a tantalizingly brief look at what to expect when the smash hit series returns in December. Don’t even care about the trailer tbh. Just stoked to hear it’s finally coming back in December!

A Crack in the Mountain Documentary about the largest cave system in the world, Son Doong in Vietnam. I’ve gotta find a way to watch this! There’s live showings at a few theaters but streaming is only in the UK right now

Watching Star Trek: The Original Series for the first time ever. Will update in a couple weeks lol 🖖

YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads YouTube claims that the pause ads are actually designed to let the company offer you a “less interruptive” experience, but it didn’t tell us that its normal ads will appear any less frequently as a result. I watch …

The “Third State” That Lies Beyond The Boundaries Of Life And Death “Life and death are traditionally viewed as opposites,” Noble told IFLScience. “However, the emergence of new multicellular lifeforms from the cells of a dead organism introduces a ‘third …

Void Text Editor: Open-Source Alternative to Cursor VS Code is to modern text editors what Chromium is to browsers: a fork magnet. A slew of niche spins have emerged, each putting their own spin on Microsoft’s massively popular original.The latest to join the fray is Void. Void is positioning …

Mozilla is shutting down its Mastodon instance We’ve made the hard decision to end our experiment with Mozilla.social and will shut down the Mastodon instance on December 17, 2024. Thank you for being part of the Mozilla.social community and providing feedback during our closed beta. They’re …

Ohio sheriff instructs residents to list homes with Harris-Walz campaign signs “When people ask me … What’s gonna happen if the Flip – Flopping, Laughing Hyena Wins??” Zuchowski wrote, referring to Harris. “I say … write down all the addresses of the people who had her signs in their yards!” …

Jobs should have surprise paid days off every once in a while. Especially on Tuesdays. (I wanna go home)

Inclusive advertising boosts sales & increases brand loyalty, new study finds The research, based on an analysis of 392 brands across 58 countries, reveals that inclusive advertising can boost short-term sales by nearly 3.5% and drive long-term sales by over 16%. Inclusive advertising also …

My experience on Vanilla OS so far: 

A lot of people assume Linux users are all hackers or at least have some background in programming. I do not. I’m part of the other demographic - the people who grew up poor and started using it to revive obsolete hardware.

I know enough shell scripting and other terminal stuff to (usually) …

The blockchain is like digital COVID. We couldn’t stop it because people kept exposing themselves to it and it grew out of control, so now we just have to coexist with it online

Lately I’ve had an obsession with Brutalist design. Stuff like The Brutalist Report and back when I used Mastodon, Brutaldon. I discovered brutalistwebsites.com this morning. I think I’m going to spend a lot of time here today.

WAIT A MINUTE Diggnation really is back?! I watched the reunion episode a while back and they joked about it, but now they’re already on episode three! I used to watch this show religiously. Now if they could just bring back Digg.com…

Biden moves to crack down on Shein and Temu, slow shipments into US “over the last 10 years, the number of shipments entering the United States claiming the de minimis exemption has increased significantly, from approximately 140 million a year to over 1 billion a year.” And the …

I try to share cool links every day but sometimes I have to remind myself that some days are uneventful. The news has been so consistently crazy for the last few years its easy to forget that.

Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules …an aqueous solution of a common food color approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, tartrazine, has the effect of reversibly making the skin, muscle, and connective tissues transparent in live rodents. The food …

Woke up to a dead mouse on the floor next to my side of the bed. One of the perks of having a cat door to the back yard 🥴

Why do I blog?: 

Lately I’ve put a lot of thought into why I blog. A few months ago, it was because I had so many ideas to get out of my head I just had to do it. I came up with post after post about my different experiences and the things I’ve learned and developed opinions on over the years. For a …

Boar’s Head Shuts Down Virginia Meat Plant After 9 Deaths Linked to Listeria I’m sure they’ll do all they can to ensure the other facilities are up to code but it makes ya wonder how it got so bad in the first place. Shit happens but I don’t think I’ll be eating …

Flappy Bird announces its return, but with a… twist So, who is the Flappy Bird Foundation? Well, get ready for a big ol' bummer. When you dig deeper, you realize the foundation specializes in the selling of everyone’s favorite Ts, NFTs. Yes, unfortunately, the company behind the …

Music industry’s 1990s hard drives, like all HDDs, are dying You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.,” writes user …

One of my favorite things about Linux is feeling like I got a whole new computer every few months when I get bored and try a new distro

Switched over to Vanilla OS after running KDE Neon for the last ~3 years. I missed GNOME! It took a minute to figure out fractional scaling from dconf editor, I was used to Plasma where it was just a default setting. Feels nice doing a hard reset every once in a while

OpenAI releases o1, its first model with ‘reasoning’ abilities The training behind o1 is fundamentally different from its predecessors, OpenAI’s research lead, Jerry Tworek, tells me, though the company is being vague about the exact details. With o1, it trained the model to …

Swingin' Back to Shellac Most 78s were 10-inches and held about three-and-a-half minutes of music. They were primarily made of shellac, which, believe it or not, is a resin secreted by lac bugs in the forests of Thailand and India. TIL old records are an insect product 🤯🎵

Ohio’s oldest continuously operating inn appears to be for sale At 212 years old, the Buxton Inn is billed as “Ohio’s oldest continuously operating inn,” and has even housed multiple celebrity guests throughout its tenure, including Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Garner, Henry Ford, …

It’s physically impossible to watch this and not smile. Major Holley - Laughing in Rhythm

Ford Seeks Patent for Software That Records Your Conversations to Serve You Ads If this kind of thing catches on I’m trading in my car for a Huffy. My phone already knows enough about me.

Re: RSS Feeds Are Great Instead of mindlessly scrolling “for you” feeds, I now spend that time reading posts from other bloggers I follow via RSS. It’s been a wonderful experience. There’s great content out there, but you must curate it yourself. An RSS reader is a great …

I waited for the public beta of iOS 18 before I installed it on my daily driver last night. An official Apple ROM is obviously a lot more stable and easier to install, but it felt a little like the good ol' days circa 2013 when I used to flash a new custom ROM on my Android phone every week or two 🥲

Right side of the bed: 

Some of my best days start out absolutely horrible. Some of my worst days start out feeling like everything is going perfect.

The old man down the road: 

I woke up to the doorbell ringing this morning. Who in the hell could be here this early?

So I got up and opened the front door. There was this little old man standing there in a brown Member’s Only jacket and some khakis.

“Hey, I’m your neighbor from two houses down,” he …

I don’t even know how this collab happened but it’s a good seltzer 😆🍻

Drafts + Micro.blog: 

I’ve been using Obsidian for all of my blog notes and drafts since I started blogging. It’s a powerhouse for writing pretty much anything from code to blog posts, and it has a ton of themes and plugins to choose from. It might not be an Everything App™ but it’s definitely an …

disposable vapes are getting out of control via twitter

Woman started wildfires so she could flirt with sexy firefighters A 44-year-old woman from Tripoli, Greece, was sentenced to three years imprisonment after deliberately starting two wildfires. Local media reports that she wanted to flirt with the sexy firefighters responding to douse the blazes, …

You don’t realize how fast time flies until 1Password tells you it’s been two weeks already and you need to manually type in your password again 😵‍💫

This robot is being controlled by a King oyster mushroom When the researchers shined a UV light on the fungus, it triggered an electrical impulse that quickly sent a signal to the motors and actuators in two custom built robots. This mostly feels like “powering a lightbulb with a potato …

We may not be responsible for the world that created our minds, but we can take responsibility for the mind with which we create our world I like this guys’s take on defining what addiction and trauma are and how they correlate. Gotta figure out who you are before the healing starts 🧘

I love brutalist design. Especially when it’s something useful, like the Brutalist Report. I don’t remember who showed it to me, who runs it or how I even found it, but it’s a really good no bullshit way to get all the top news stories for the day

Live for today: 

I saw an ancient meme on Reddit the other day, something along the lines of “in 10 years you’ll want to go back to now because the good old days are happening and we don’t even know it.”

I quit energy drinks: 

I’ve been drinking at least one 12oz Redbull a day since somewhere around 2010. Right after high school, I was doing a lot of manual labor jobs so the extra energy boost really helped. Especially after partying all night like college kids do.

Florida Surgeon Fatally Removed a Man’s Liver Instead of His Spleen, Family Says Only in Florida 😬

Little white lies about blue light The frequently cited 2013 study about blue light and its affect on sleep had just 5 participants and questionable methodology…Melatonin levels—not sleep quality—were measured before and after the 30 minute experiment. There was no control group. a 2021 …

The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital …

Labor Day is the dumbest holiday. Let’s honor the working class by making all of their checks a day late this week 😫

Thoughts on AI to help with little bits of code: 

I know AI in coding is a touchy subject, but I’ve been learning a lot using Claude to help do things I otherwise had no idea how to do. I still have to know what I’m trying to realistically accomplish and what code I need to change, and how to shoehorn it into the rest of the code it …

In honor of bleptember 🫡

It's ok to disagree: I was talking to a coworker about his experience buying a car recently. Every time the salesman would suggest something, he’d push back like “eh I don’t like that color” or “yeah I don’t really like that brand.” Then the salesman would cave and agree like …

I thought I had this profound thought about picking the people in your life, etc then I realized it’s already a thing: If you can’t change the people around you, change the people around you Cheesy? Maybe. But I like it 😜

New VWs will answer some of your questions with ChatGPT I was just reading about how people don’t want fancy tech packages in their car if it raises the price. Then I saw this article from The Verge: Drivers in cars that support ChatGPT will need to be subscribed to VW’s Plus Speech with AI …

Revisiting why I quit social media: 

So a couple weeks ago I decided to get rid of social media. I deleted my Mastodon account permanently but only deactivated Bluesky. I couldn’t help myself. I logged back on the next day. I do like it there. It feels less radical than Mastodon and more like how old Twitter felt way back in the …

From The Onion

I like Obsidian but I’m realizing I don’t use any of its unique features really. I only use it for post drafts and simple notes. I cancelled my sync subscription and I’m going to try using Strata instead for a while

Found an old promo copy of The Final Cut at a used record store the other day and I can’t stop listening to it 🫨🎵

NaNoWriMo Says Condemning AI Is ‘Classist and Ableist’ Daniel José Older, a lead story architect for Star Wars: The High Republic and author of multiple series including Outlaw Saints, posted his resignation from the NaNoWriMo writers board I agree it’s dumb to allow AI in a writing contest …

It’s finally (almost) fall! 🍁🍺

CD Projekt Says Cyberpunk 2077 Will Return to Animation I’m not big on anime and I never played the Cyberpunk games but I was OBSESSED with the anime! Was really bummed out when they said it was one and done. Would be cool to see a spinoff or something like that

A hate hate relationship: 

I’m lucky in the relationship department. We rarely ever fight and when we do, we might avoid each other for the rest of the day or maybe a couple days if it’s a particularly bad argument but we always approach it in a diplomatic way once we’ve both gathered our bearings. We work …

Former Riot Games employees leverage generative AI to power NPCs Retail Mage is a roleplaying game that allows players to take on the role of a wizard working as a salesperson at a magical furniture store. The main goal of the game is to earn five-star reviews by helping customers. But it’s really …

AnandTech shuts down after 27 years For the past several years it seems as if there has been a trend away from ultimate understanding in content online and towards the tenets of modern mainstream media (sensationalism and the general silliness you see on US cable TV news). I never read AnandTech …

When I had covid I never lost my sense of smell or taste completely but now that I’m over it everything tastes… different. Never experienced anything like it before 😳

I am obsessed with these lately 🍺

Walked up to the screen door and this little guy landed right in front of me! I hear that’s good luck 😏

Black mold, flies and roaches, rancid smells: No wonder Boar’s Head caused a listeria outbreak! Boar’s Head deli meat was recalled last month after it caused a listeria outbreak that killed at least nine people and sent 57 others to the hospital…A black mold-like substance was …

This Is Doom Running on a Diffusion Model the diffusion model is trained gameplay footage of Doom to produce the next frame based on the frames that came before it and player input. the development process for video games under this new paradigm might be less costly and more accessible, whereby …

Corn sweat: crop moisture amplifies humidity and heat in US midwest One acre of corn, which is a little smaller than the size of an American football field, can can create 3,000 to 4,000 gallons of corn sweat, Clark said. Can confirm. Source: am in Ohio

Slow down: 

Anxiety is literally going too fast. Thinking too far ahead, trying to compute all the possible outcomes of a situation as if that’s remotely possible. I’m bad about that.

Digital clutter: 

A messy home can really bring my mood down. I always feel a lot better when the floors are vacuumed and mopped and there isn’t a bunch of junk all over the table.

I feel the same way about my digital life. It almost gives me a stroke when I see someone with five or six home screens packed edge …

The original Pineapple Cider 🍍🍺

Former Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to shut down engines in-flight shares his story On Friday night, the group took psychedelic mushrooms – a drug that can make you hallucinate and typically has effects that last a few hours. “There was a feeling of being trapped, like, ‘Am I …

COVID made me rethink my career: 

I’m just getting over a bad case of COVID, so that means back to work. It’s pretty sad to admit, but even with how shitty I’ve felt for the last 10 days, it was nice forgetting about the daily grind. I slept as much as I could every day, I caught up on a lot of good television and …

Man Spills Blue Cheese in Car, Interior Becomes Covered in Mold Overnight …the closed car doors and lack of ventilation effectively created a greenhouse for the mold to grow, causing it to spread throughout the entirety of the vehicle, coating it in what looks like white film. This …

Neil Young Personally Approved ‘Rockin’ in the Free World,’ the Song He Sued Trump Over in 2020, for Tim Walz at the DNC No caption needed but the other side can have lynyrd skynyrd probably 😜

In ‘Fictional Nature,’ Fabian Knecht Encloses Live Trees and Craggy Stones in a White Cube Gallery Walk into one of Fabian Knecht’s installations, and you’ll likely smell the dewy, herbal scent of moss and the sweet musk of wood, fragrant evidence of life growing amidst clinical, fluorescent lights …

Spent most of the morning digging through Robert Birming’s Blog Inspiration page. So many good posts and resources! birming.com/blog-insp…

What We Learned In Our First Year of 404 Media A year ago today, we published a blog post called “Welcome to 404 Media.” In that post, we explained that the four of us quit our jobs to start something new, and set some goals for ourselves. They grow up so fast 🥲🎂

I’m finally starting to get over this covid stuff. Still not back to 100% and I can’t really taste much but I’m feeling a lot better. In a couple days I’ll be back at work. Feels like post vacation depression honestly. I’m not ready to reintegrate with society yet!

No sick days: 

I’m on day four of COVID. Started feeling a little weird at work Friday and I woke up Saturday feeling like I got thrown down a flight of stairs. I told my boss I should be good just taking the weekend off and I’ll be back Monday.

Yeah, that didn’t take. I woke up feeling even …

Authors sue Anthropic for copyright infringement over AI training The complaint, filed on Monday, opens new tab by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, said that Anthropic used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human …

CSS is like Tetris through text commands

One of my favorite pics from that Blink 182 show. Idk why really, I’ve just never been that close to the cameraman lol

You can't say that on Youtube!: 

George Carlin had that list of dirty words you couldn’t say on TV back in the 70’s. Record labels release edited versions of hit songs to clean them up for radio. Movies are always censored to remove nudity and profanity for TV.

Those weren't the best years of your life: 

My generation is pretty bad about not wanting to grow up. We talk about how we “just can’t adult today,” or how our parents seemed so grown up when they were in their 30s but we still feel like kids.

Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse. Representatives for LG and Samsung declined to comment to Ars Technica about how much of their respective company’s business is ad sales. But the deals they’ve made with data-collection firms signal big interest in …

Late night hangs: 

I can’t think of anything I love more than the dead of night. I don’t know what it is, specifically. I used to think it was because that’s when all the parties happen, but the older I get the more I realize I didn’t even like raging with big groups of people in the first …

Mozilla’s New Logo Brings Back the Dinosaur Mascot (Kinda) It could be viewed as a flag on a pole. Sort of like Mozilla planting its values in the ground to say “we’re here, come join”. But it’s more likely a nod to the original Mozilla mascot (inherited from its Netscape beginnings), which was a …

Trump Once Compared Avoiding STDs to His ‘Personal Vietnam’ “You know, if you’re young, and in this era, and if you have any guilt about not having gone to Vietnam. We have our own Vietnam. It’s called the dating game,” he said during a discussion of …

I don't really like Fridays: I’m sick at home with covid and, coincidentally, this is the first weekend I’ve had off in as long as I can remember. Usually Fridays are my Monday and Wednesday and Thursday is my weekend. I like it that way. If I have to go get a haircut, I’m in and out within 20 minutes at 2pm …

Imported all my posts from Bear Blog 👀 I’m all in on Micro.blog now. It was too much having an entirely separate website just for longer posts.

The Scent Of UX: The Unrealized Potential Of Olfactory Design Odors may not replace textbooks and lectures, but their addition will make remembering and recalling things significantly easier. In fact, researchers from MIT built and tested a wearable scent-emitting device that can be used for …

Let this tiny bean bag chair for your lap hold your heavy handhelds Doomscrolling isn’t going away any time soon, but there’s no reason you can’t be comfortable while doing it. Mechanism’s $59 Gaming Pillow is designed to shift the weight of gadgets like handheld consoles, tablets, XL smartphones, …

Friday is my Monday 😩 but I don’t work until noon tomorrow so it’s also kind of my Friday

Speed is my enemy When I deliberately try to think and move more slowly, things happen faster. That sounds like a contradiction, but not having to rewrite words or clean up spills makes everything move along at a more consistent pace. And I don’t swear as much. I feel this so much! If I slow down …

Really liking the redesigned Reeder TestFlight. It doesnt pull the full article like Unread or Reeder 5 on feeds that only show summaries but the support for Micro.blog and Mastodon is pretty nice

Overthinking: a self-inflicted scam: I’m bad about overthinking. Like obnoxiously bad. I can never leave well enough alone because I start thinking about what I should have done or how I can do the same thing, only better. Then a few days later I’ve forgotten all about whatever it was and I’m already overthinking the …

Don't meet your heroes: Mr. Beast edition: 

I keep getting sucked into watching the Mr. Beast drama that’s been going on for the last few weeks. Ava Tyson was called out for sending inappropriate Discord messages to minors and since then more and more former employees are coming out and revealing all sorts of greasy stuff about what …

A few pics I took at the Blink 182 show in Columbus tonight. Tom had a cold so Mark sang a lot of the songs. Travis even sang one. At one point they had this girl from the audience get on stage to sing First Date and she ended up knowing none of the words lol I felt so bad for her 😬

Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda says it’s okay if we end up marrying AI chatbots For some people, it means marriage, it means romance, and that’s fine. That’s just the flavor that they like. But in reality, that’s the same thing as being a friend with an AI. It’s achieving the same goals for them: it’s …

Co-Founder of DDoSecrets Was Dark Web Drug Kingpin A co-founder of transparency activism organization Distributed of Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets) was a dark web drug kingpin who ran the successor to the infamous Silk Road marketplace and was later convicted of child abuse imagery crimes. Whoa. I …

Can’t remember who showed this to me but it’s pretty cool. Enter a location and it shows you the indigenous territories, treaties and language. Native Land

From r/chrissimpsonsartist

I’ve never liked watching literally any sporting event but I’ve been obsessing over the Olympics this year. A couple weeks every four years is the perfect amount of sports for me I guess lol

Elon Musk Slammed for Filling Orbit With Space Junk SpaceX has launched over 6,000 Starlink internet satellites into low-Earth orbit, and is planning to bring that total to as many as 42,000 in the upcoming years. Regulation hasn’t caught up with commercial entities like SpaceX building out …

Nova Launcher, savior of cruft-filled Android phones, is on life support …when mobile app metrics firm Branch acquired the popular and well-regarded Nova Launcher for Android, the app’s site put up one of those self-directed FAQ posts about it. Under the question heading “What …

playing around with CSS all day instead of working really makes the work day fly by

The company has its roots in the very dirtiest kinds of Bitcoin mining. Its top execs (including CEO Paul Prager) were involved with Beowulf Energy LLC, a company that convinced struggling coal plant operators to keep operating in order to fuel Bitcoin mining rigs. There’s evidence that top …

In other news I just legally bought weed for the first time a little bit ago 🕺

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman hinted at “new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas.” We’ve had versions of premium community features in the past, like r/goldlounge, that users loved, so we’re exploring new ways to empower moderators and communities to …

Ohio dispensaries started selling recreational weed today 🥹 www.dispatch.com/story/new…

I don’t think OpenAI really cares about false positives with text watermarking lol they just don’t want to lose paying customers 99.9 percent accuracy sounds like a lot, but imagine that one among 1,000 college papers was falsely labeled as cheating. That could lead to some unfortunate …

“This landmark decision holds Google accountable,” DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter said in a statement. “It paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans.” As if Google will face any real consequences other than paying some fines and …

This is what I always wanted tumblr to be back in the day. More of a micro blog for text instead of an endless stream of edgy gifs

Just realized you can follow literally any website on micro.blog by searching the url 🤯

How can we have a robot on mars but over the last 100 years there’s been no progress in keeping the drain from clogging when you shave 😐

What is the IndieWeb even?: 

If you’ve been into running a blog or personal site very long, it’s safe to say you’ve heard the terms “IndieWeb” or “small web” thrown around. I’ve only been into this stuff for a few months at this point but my understanding of what that actually …

People who don't tip: 

I don’t get the anti-tipping culture on Reddit. There’s a whole community of people who never leave tips, pretending to protest in favor of the tipped employee because their wages should be higher? “Hey I don’t think you make enough money so I’m punishing you for your …

A secret feature of AI when you’re using it to help with coding is that it’s a great punching bag. You can get as mad as you want when something isn’t working and it’ll just apologize and offer solutions. Usually passive aggressively. It talked me out of giving up on …

Don't be embarrassed: 

I hate that lol you’re nervous about something and someone tells you aw don’t be nervous!

Or you’re stressing over something and they scream at you to CALM THE FUCK DOWN!!

Oh okay! I didn’t think about it that way! I’m so silly 🤪

For real though, one of the things about …

Man the church of Scientology really has a lot of foot soldiers handing out junk about Dianetics lol this is the second time someone’s stopped by here in the last couple of weeks

I’m running out of time to make a Blaugust post today. I can usually get a post knocked out while I’m at work but between how busy we were and making little tweaks to my blog it’s about time to go home! I have other more urgent things to tend to on a Saturday night aka catching a …

Finally reading documentation on what microhooks actually do. I can do pretty much whatever I want with some of these themes huh? Neat!

I think Safari’s reading list is the only Read Later service I’ve ever successfully used. It forces me to look at all the stuff I saved every time I open Safari so I eventually feel pressured enough to actually read the articles

I knew Intel had to be in bad shape when they announced they were building a factory in central Ohio lol we can never have anything nice here www.vox.com/technolog…

I love these 😆 web.badges.world

You people are so much more pleasant than the Facebook and Twitter people 🥲

I like minimalism. Sometimes that manifests as trying to condense things into the most simplified version of whatever it is. I feel like it’s kind of redundant to have a blog here and one on Bear Blog. I like all the features here but I like the minimalism of Bear too. So I’m back to …

Oof this feels like one of those cheesy April fools jokes some websites post to be cute. Gravitar is getting into crypto 🤢 www.jwz.org/blog/2024…

This is my absolute favorite Macintosh wallpaper of all time 😻

US Politics: Can't get fooled again: 

I’ve worked a few different sales positions over the years, but mostly in the furniture business. It’s probably the most notorious for gimmicks, deceptive advertising and terrible customer service.

They advertise things like puncture-proof fabric on sofas, cooling gel or even diamond …

I used AI to generate a robots.txt that blocks AI: 

I’m so fucking lazy. I’ve never really messed with robots.txt. I’m kinda new to personal blogging; back in the 2000s I had a tech blog but I wanted everything to index my site. I even submitted my link to a bunch of off brand search engines to get my name out there.

But now …

I feel like anyone who doesn’t want AI scraping their website will eventually have to rely on constantly updated filters, uBlock Origin style but for robots.txt www.404media.co/websites-…

On anxiety: I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get on the right medications to bring my anxiety levels from a blood curdling scream to a dull whimper. I think I’ve got it mostly squared away at this point in my life. The circular thinking and stressing over things I shouldn’t care about are …

Trading Material You for Apple's walled garden: 

I was a loyal Android fanboy since my very first smartphone: the LG Optimus running Android 2.2 Froyo

Before that, I was obsessed with everything Google was doing. I was naive enough to think they actually lived by the “don’t be evil” mantra. Search was still good and Google+ was a …

Apocalypse Now(ish): 

Sometimes I wonder if anyone else shares the same views on “the end” as I do. I’m not trying to be edgy and I’m not a doomer or an accelerationist but with all the crazy shit going on in the world, it’s easy to imagine a doomsday scenario where we don’t have to …

Web 2.0 tricked us: 

I’m a little too young to have really appreciated the pre-Web 2.0 internet. Me and my cousin had our own Tripod sites when we were kids but we really didn’t know what we were doing.

Then we got a little older and MySpace came out. It was like having your own little stripped down website …

Hug your server admins: I’ve never done much in the way of web hosting or development. I ran a more “professional” tech blog a long time ago, but that’s about as far into it as I got. I’ve never messed around with SQL, PHP, SSL certificates or different DNS configurations. I just ran a …

The indie web is saving my sanity: A lot of my posts have covered stuff I don’t ever have the time of day to talk about. I work too much and almost all of my coworkers are conservative boomers. I don’t talk to most of them much but every once in a while I’ll have to share a store with some of them. Sometimes they …

My real blog is a massive unorganized text file that lives in Obsidian

Do something awesome. For free.: I’ve spent the last month blogging and surfing the indie web. It’s still so new to me I can’t shut the fuck up about it. You’ll have to excuse me, because before that, I spent a lot of time scrolling Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, big news publications, listening to big commercial …

I was originally going to completely switch to Bear Blog but now I’m thinking I’ll keep my more conversational, short form stuff here. Micro blogging suddenly makes more sense now that I have a place to post the longer stuff

I’ve heard so many sales managers use the analogy “They’re playing checkers but we’re playing chess,” when in reality everyone’s playing tic tac toe

From MP3 to LP: As someone who grew up during the golden age of digital piracy, I’m 100% sure records really do sound better than MP3s. Sure there’s lossless audio too, but we stream everything now and the quality is really only as good as your internet connection. Streaming is convenient; I’m not …

This is the first sunburn I’ve had in five years. We didn’t get out much at the old apartment. It’s nice having a big yard but it would be nicer if the sun could back off a little 🙃

Life goes five years at a time: This could totally be a quote from some sappy movie or a self-help book maybe, I’m not sure. But I went to a funeral a few months ago and saw a lot of family I’d distanced myself from over the years. Not because of something crazy that happened, or a political disagreement or anything …

Finding my digital home : 

I’m not one of the cool people who were on the Fediverse before the big Twitter exodus of 2022.

When Elon took over, I was one of many who mourned the death of Twitter and moved on to a better place: Mastodon. It was such a refreshing change of pace.

Happy Solstice! (I'm miserable): 

I’m a winter person. Snow is beautiful. Sun burns are not. Every year when the heat gets unbearable, I fantasize about moving to Alaska. My girlfriend unfortunately doesn’t share this dream with me.

How to micro blog: First, I start with a long rambling post full of redundant information. Usually at least 3000 characters, saying the same thing 20 different ways. The more the better. Then its time to delete almost all of it and what you’re left with should be a perfect short form blog …

We're just clothes: When I stop at the gas station or the grocery store after work I’m in my full salesguy attire: a long sleeve oxford, usually black or grey slacks and black leather dress shoes with the little strip of fake wood around the heel. People call me “sir” and look at me like I have my …