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 of the snooping Siri case
🔗 Apple CEO Tim Cook donates $1 million to Trump inauguration
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 last night while watching Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen with my better half <3
We have a lot of terrible shit ahead of us after Jan 20th but I’m still optimistic about 2025. They say it’s always darkest before the dawn.
I hope everyone’s having a good day off today and I wish you all a happy 2025 🎉
I think I’ll have a shot of Mucinex now.
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 to do that.”
This is one reason I’m so open about my bisexuality even though I’m in a straight relationship. I could hide it to fit in better, but I’d rather be honest about who I am. Also some straight people like to say a lot of terrible shit when they think a gay isn’t in the room with them.
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 – Ramaswamy threw down a gauntlet.
I thought they’d at least make it into the White House before the real infighting started 🍿
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 refurbished Apple Watch and some Air Pods. Super fucking thoughtful gifts from everyone. I thought we were just doing little things this year and not making a big fuss but man they really blew me out of the water.
This is cheesy but the biggest gift I got out of all of this was feeling loved.
I don’t know why it took so long for it to hit me, but we’ve grown so much together over the years. When we met a little over six years ago, we were both spending most nights out at the bar getting shitfaced and going home to our terrible apartment in the hood with obnoxious room mates. Now we’re living in a nice little neighborhood in a three bedroom house of our own and the fucking cats even have their own room. This is the first Christmas we’ve had over here.
Life gets so busy you don’t really feel anything changing until you’ve already been there for a while. I feel like Adam Sandler coming to in Click. I feel like I just got hit with the goddamn ghosts of Christmas.
I try so hard to act like all of this is just dumb capitalist bullshit; I’ve never been big for celebrating holidays or exchanging gifts but it’s a downright emotional experience exchanging thoughtful things with people you love.
Even though I’m coughing my lungs out and missed out on a lot this year, this has been the best Xmas I’ve had in a long time.
Not sure if I’ll post this tonight or tomorrow but I hope everyone’s doing good out there <3
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 top of the cage!
It’s too young to determine the gender right now but I’m hoping it turns out to be female. They live up to 12 years while males only live for maybe four if you’re lucky.
It’s a bizarre thing but it’s one of the most thoughtful xmas gifts I’ve ever gotten 🥲
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 insane lately. The LED headlights are bad enough, but if you’re in the more… rural parts of ‘merica you also have dipshits in jacked up trucks covered in cheap LED light bars from Walmart tailgating you in the slow lane.
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 over the last few updates because it broke so many things on Debian 12. One update couldn’t load the filesystem right, the next one broke wired connections and only WiFi worked, then the next update broke WiFi and only wired connections worked.
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 of all the places to show up on earth, they pick New Jersey‽”
I’m just not sure aliens would comply with FAA lighting requirements like these drones do though 😆
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 whatever devices you’ve installed them on.
But they’re entertaining.
I’m a broken record about this but ever since Twitter went to shit I’ve become pretty comfortable joining new social networks on a whim and deleting my account out of the blue if I get bored or fed up. There are just too many options out there. I’ve built my home base on Micro.blog because of its die-hard indie web roots; just about everything else is for doomscrolling and shitposting as far as I’m concerned.
That said, I fully support the TikTok ban - as long as Meta gets the same treatment.
Both are two sides of the same coin, but an American oligarch owns one half of that coin while China owns the other. If Meta was based in Beijing you can bet your ass it would be on the chopping block for the exact reasons as TikTok.
But it’s not, so it’s going to be fine.
That’s the post.
‘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 new episodes will be a little longer since there are only four of them but either way I’ll take it!