Posts tagged “twitter”

• “Stranger, here you will do well to tarry; here our highest good is pleasure.”
• In Praise of The Pitt, the Most Normal Show on Television
• Bluesky has overtaken its flailing rival Twitter in hosting posts related to new academic research. – via eicathomefinn.bsky.social
• How do you get over losing The Masters?
• Rick Steves is now on Bluesky!
• For your enjoyment: Here is Secretary of Education Linda McMahon talking about implementing AI in schools, but pronouncing it “A1” as in “A1 Steak Sauce” – via joshkovensky.bsky.social
• This Is Not Normal:
  • Daughter captures the moment masked ICE agents smash the window of her mother’s car in order to take her into custody. – via mims.bsky.social
  • America Is Backsliding Toward Its Most Polluted Era
  • WITAF? Members of the cabinet, as well as Congresspeople and Senators, are being instructed to wear a golden POTUS bust lapel pin as a tribute to their inglorious, convicted felon leader. – via kwcollins.bsky.social
  • Just weeks away from graduation, at least 50 international students at Arizona State University have inexplicably had their visas revoked and have been blocked from completing their degrees.
  • The acting head of the Internal Revenue Service resigned after the Treasury Department and Homeland Security reached an agreement to share tax data from some immigrants living in the country without legal status.
  • The director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that deportation should operate just like Amazon “But With Human Beings” – via thebasement.nz
  • Days after being confirmed in February, FBI Director Kash Patel was apparently removed from his post as the acting chief of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – via girlsreallyrule.bsky.social

• Take a minute today to read this tribute to Dan Jezek and the story of his website, bricklink, the world’s largest online LEGO marketplace.
• A Guide to Using Signal for Government Workers – via kottke, who is doing a great job reporting on the ongoing coup
• In less than eight years the NCAA went from banning North Carolina from hosting championships due to its bathroom bill to [kowtowing to a cartoonishly evil conman]. – via @bubbaprog.lol
• The universe could undergo a ‘catastrophic change’ that could alter absolutely everything, quantum machine shows.
• Hopefully reading this will help convince you to dump Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter. The Technological Poison Pill: How the ATProtocol Baked into Bluesky Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification – via Jodi Ettenberg
• The President’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education could prove more costly for red states than blue.
• Incompetence and desperation are a bad combination. The important thing to remember is that [the “DOGE” attempt to get employees to resign] isn’t about economic efficiency, despite what the billionaire at the helm may say. It’s about efficiently breaking morale within the federal government to make it easier to dismantle from the inside.
• Related: “DOGE” staffer steps down after racist posts emerge
• “NOAA workers ordered to stop all communications with foreign nationals. Workers covering things like air transportation safety, drought, monitor coral reef destruction, and guarding railway shipping carriers against dangerous weather affected.” – via @timmarchman.bsky.social
• “Twenty years ago, when Jeremiah Trotter, Sr won an NFC championship with the Eagles, baby Trotter Jr. was on the field, in his father’s arms. Now he’s playing for the Eagles in this year’s Super Bowl.” – via @npr.org

• This brilliant bit of investigative reporting (with math!) – into how Threads changed its algorithm to start throttling engagement on posts about climate change – should tell you everything you need to know about which platforms are enshittification engines and which one is not. And with that, I’m effectively done with Meta. (Mastodon might be a safe social network alternative, but it’s currently far too complicated for the general public.)
• Dozens of official government websites have been exploited by spammers to redirect to porn. – via jbhall56.bsky.social
• As a diehard Florida Gators fan, I absolutely adore sporting this lapel pin I found recently at LostLustSupply.com. It was designed by artist Emily Elizabeth Miller and she’s got some other great stuff for sale, too.
• “What’s the point of being rich if you can’t afford to do the right thing.” – via Kelsey Hightower
• A.J. Brown read his book during a playoff game. The story behind the book is even more unusual.
• Olympic swimmer Gary Hall Jr. to receive replacement medals after losing originals in L.A. fires.
• “You were drunk. You tried to dance with strippers. You had to be held off the stage,” said Sen. Tim Kaine, recounting allegations against Fox News host Pete Hegseth during his confirmation to be Trump’s defense secretary. – via crooked media (See also: Jamelle Bouie speaks the truth.)

• This LA Times interactive map of the Southern California wildfires has been very handy. – via @dansinker.com
• “Just a reminder that the French revolution started with a climate crisis-induced famine, an empire that had overexpanded into too many foreign wars, and parasitic nobility that funneled all the wealth upward while regular citizens suffered.” – via @chris.writes.books
• If you want to “follow” me somewhere (other than here, of course), you should use my verified account on bluesky. I adored Twitter when it launched, and for many years after. But I haven’t looked at that social network in months and deleted my account a while ago. I’ve been enjoying Threads, but it looks like it’s time to abandon that platform, too. I’m very, very glad I have my own personal website. (I hardly ever look at Instagram, and doubt I’ll keep my account there for much longer. If I didn’t feel obligated to remain on LinkedIn, I’d quit that site, too.)
• In China, there are registries of haunted apartments. If you’re willing to live somewhere with a sinister history, you can get a discount of 30%. – via @tomwhitwell
• I am starting to get concerned about the bird flu, H5N1. Paying attention to updates from Your Local Epidemiologist is a good way to be prepared.
• A wilderness survival trainer spent years undercover, climbing the ranks of right-wing militias. He didn’t tell police or the FBI. He didn’t tell his family or friends. Then, in 2023, a ProPublica reporter received an envelope with no return address. Inside was a flash drive containing tens of thousands of secret files. – via @propublica
• “In species where males invest in weaponry (antlers, horns, tusks, etc.), female brains are bigger.” – via Kent Hendricks

• A man in Canada’s far north leapt on to a polar bear to protect his wife from being mauled, police say. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• I love this quote: “[Software bugs] are a lot like prime numbers. There are always more, but after you find the first couple billion they do thin out quite a bit.” – via @philcrissman (threads / bluesky)
• It’s a good idea to occasionally revisit the story of Roger and Elaine.
• Mark Ruffalo sounds like the name a dog would give if he was pretending to be a man. – via @the.yael
• Need to buy something for someone you can’t stand? Check out My Heinous Gift Guide for Sworn Enemies. And note that you don’t actually have to stay on Twitter. – both via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
• Jonathan Edward Durham is a good follow on threads and/or bluesky.
• Your Local Epidemiologist is a super informative newsletter that translates complicated health news, especially about viruses and colds.
• 19 Useful Mac Startup Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know
• What do you call a pig that does karate? A pork chop! – via 172 Corny Jokes To Tell To Kids You Love

• Eight vignettes about power and (mis)understanding, and children, I guess, from Making It Work – via kottke
• For the first time in 37 years scientists have observed orcas wearing dead salmons as hats – via @nerdist (threads / bluesky)
• Take notes, not photos: Recent research found that if you want to strengthen your memory, taking notes by hand beats taking pictures every time—because it keeps your brain engaged and focused. – via Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s Pump Club (threads / bluesky)
• Florida’s furious finish on the recruiting trail caps stellar month for Billy Napier – via The Athletic (threads / bluesky)
• Just one retail chain was enough for Taylor Swift to have the top-selling book last week and the biggest publishing launch of 2024. – via The Hollywood Reporter (threads / bluesky)
• “No big deal, just a 12-foot long jump wearing football pads while clearing another human being.” – via @cfbalerts (threads / bluesky)
• Where to donate your money to fight climate change effectively – via @vox (threads / bluesky)
• Bluesky brings the fun, weird vibes of old Twitter back to life – also via @vox
• “I accidentally used my mom’s fabric scissors to cut wrapping paper and now the cops are here.” – via @wdgoodnight

• Want 33,000 classic sound effects for free? Check out the BBC Sound Effects Archive.
• I am very much concerned about the many, many, many possible negative consequences of nefarious, incompetent, and/or misguided generative AI. Ruining wikipedia should have been on my bingo card.
• A University College London demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans won an Ig Nobel prize. I always thought blue zones sounded fishy.
• Ugh. Scientists are worried that persisting cognitive issues sparked by COVID-19 may signal a coming surge of dementia and other mental conditions.
• Philip Moscovitch‘s Halifax Examiner article Beyond the Link Tax: Journalism and the Changing Nature of the Internet contains some interesting ideas about potentially taxing megacorporations to subsidize good reporting. But what grabbed me was the line, “Essentially, what we are seeing is the slow death of the hyperlink […]” Sites like Threads, Instagram, Twitter / X, et.al. have a vested interest in keeping you from leaving. They are, in fact, designed to make it more difficult for you to get to the “rest” of the Internet. I have been occasionally combing through old posts here and it is alarming — for someone who’s been blogging regularly for more than a quarter of a century — how many links simply no longer work. And I’m not talking about links from twenty years ago which should work but don’t (because the site’s gone offline or developers didn’t bother to redirect URLs). I’m talking about links from just a year or two ago. The wayback machine has been a fantastic resource to help me find archived content, but it’s not perfect and it’s grossly underfunded for how important it is to anyone who cares. See also: link rot
• Speaking of being extremely online, you should read Reclaiming Social Media in a Fragmented World. I love the concept of POSSE and it’s been something I’ve really tried to remember the last few years, especially after what’s happened with Twitter.
• On Ghost Networks: Ravi Coutinho bought a health insurance plan thinking it would deliver on its promise of access to mental health providers. But even after twenty-one phone calls and multiple hospitalizations, no one could find him a therapist.

As a quick follow-up to my note about the lugubrious and lamentable demise of Twitter, I want to point out that I am loving Threads. Yes, I am well aware that it is a Meta product. But so far it has been a fantastic social media replacement for me. It is sorely lacking in sports coverage and the algorithm doesn’t seem to handle breaking news very well, but I’ll counter that it appears to immediately alert me any time anyone anywhere mentions Soapdish. So I call that a win.

Things are definitely going downhill on the bird site. I logged on this morning and was greeted with multiple hardcore xxx videos / images when viewing a fairly innocent trending topic. First time that’s happened in 15+ years.