Glad to see David Simon (of The Wire, etc) has not lost his flair.

Another historical tangent from pinball museum research: back in the day radio DJs could buy their humor in bulk. From Cashbox Magazine, January 1979. https://digital.libraries.wm.edu/cash-box-vol-40-issue-34

The business community seems to finally be realizing that under Trump the future is no longer predictable. This will not change, because Trump is an abuser. Being erratic and volatile is a common abuser technique to extend control, because it trains their targets that they must pay constant […]

@williampietri On a similar note of modest heroism, my brother - an avid gardner - does "guerilla grafting" of fruit branches onto park trees.

I can't fix the big things, but I can do something about the small ones. A few days ago I went to the post office to ship something. I put it in one of the flat rate boxes and went to address it. Of the 6 pen-on-chain doodads they had, only one was left, and […] [Original post on sfba.social]

Fuck the entirety of this: https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/10/07/national-guard-arrives-in-chicago-area-despite-judge-urging-feds-to-hold-off/ #chicago

Is there a way under stock Android to play music through a Bluetooth speaker but keep notification sounds on my phone? This seems like an obvious need for anybody in a room with other people, but 15 minutes of internet searching has not yielded a functioning answer.

Here's a great example of why I happily give @Defector my money. If you're wondering why Bari Weiss is suddenly running CBS news, read the first and last few paragraphs of this. And if you want to know the details of billionaire media consolidation, read the whole thing […]

I shouldn't need to say this, but I guess it's how social media works: just because someone doesn't post about something doesn't mean they don't care about it. If I posted to express my sadness at every atrocity, racist incident, horrific murder or terrorist attack that happened in the world I'd […]

Damn I love nerds. It turns out, the rich don't move because of taxes 🤓 💸 dems quit basing policy on economic delusions challenge. https://www.wweek.com/news/2025/08/06/county-commissioner-brings-expert-on-millionaire-migration-into-preschool-debate/

Who else has trouble maintaining expressions for photos and selfies? Despite years of trying, I'm totally unable to hold a photo smile. The main way I cope is to say or at least think of something funny, but almost inevitably the picture taker will miss the narrow window when I look natural. If […]

Per the National Venture Capital Association, VC fundraising was down significantly the last couple of years. I wonder if that explains some of the frantic tone of the AI bubble. Those who raised during the boom years need to put that money to work. And everybody […] [Original post on sfba.social]

Oh, what a loss for us all. Tonight I'll pour one out for Jane Goodall. She and the primatologists who followed after deeply influenced how I see myself and you. The great apes are our close cousins, and to ignore that is to needlessly render ourselves inexplicable […]

I saw somebody trying to blame the AI bubble on conspiracy, but I think that's unnecessary. We can entirely explain this bubble the same way we can explain the blockchain and metaverse bubbles. We lived through two back-to-back revolutions in technology: the Internet and the smartphone. Many […]

I feel like this must exist, but I can't find it; a digital picture frame with a decent API. Ideally, a local (that is, non-cloud) one. Anybody have anything like that?

All y'all who didn't vote for Kamala because she didn't pass whichever purity test you envisioned for her... This is on you.

If you're not white, you can be arrested. That was clearly stated. This is what America is, a racist fascist state. 😡🤬 Feds march into downtown Chicago; top border agent says people are arrested based on ‘how they look’ - Chicago Sun-Times […]

I’m the world’s slowest dot matrix printer

Chotiner is unmatched at doing an interview that lays bare the subject's hypocrisy and self-delusion. It's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy at this point, because anybody who sits down with him has to have enormous self-regard to think it'll be different for them […]

In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away: In fact, status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but bu how much one gives away. The currency in a gift economy is […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

My study of old #folklore gets more and more relevant to current-day affairs. Example: All of these narratives about "Things That Cause #autism " are basically recycled folk tales about #changelings . Right now, we are at the: "The child is WRONG somehow - the mother must have been careless!" […]

My computer is also struggling with Monday.

While people are suddenly and uncharacteristically paying attention to media regulation, please take a moment to notice all the massive harm Brendan Carr has done to consumer protection and public safety as well me, back in April:

Just canceled my Hulu subscription and let the know I'm doing it because in this time of rising authoritarianism, it's important to support free speech, and I'd rather give my money to companies with actual values.

Is there an open source solution for this problem? We have a workshop. Volunteers use it. There are many pegboards and shelves with bins. It is hard to find things, even ones right in front of you. I would like a thing that has pictures of the spots where […] [Original post on sfba.social]

One of the most striking things for me about the US's slide toward strongman authoritarianism is the collapse of principle. I spent decades trying to see where people were coming from based on what they said was important to them. Seems like I took their words way more seriously than they ever did.

I know it’s to keep away bots but I like to imagine they had to do this to keep ants from editing their own pages.

I'm looking for experience-based recommendations of indoor security cameras. This is for The Flip, our pinball museum. I'm looking for 3, maybe 4 cameras to cover a couple of 400 sq ft rooms and a hallway. I plan to run Frigate on a NUC, so I think I need POE […] [Original post on sfba.social]

Every time I heard Charlie Kirk's schtick called "debate", it bothered me, because no Kirk clip I ever saw was anything like debate. Happily, Mike Masnick has saved us all from watching enough Kirk to properly describe what he was actually doing […]

A grim reminder: these people will never be satisfied. There’s no point at which they will say “we’ve won, let’s enjoy life.” They will always be looking for someone else to punish, to revile, to dehumanize. They’re empty without that.

Queen

Now once I get this restored, I want people to be able to play it and get the same experience they would in 1936. But I don't want to get arrested, and I don't want people walking off with the proceeds. So I started searching for nickel-sized brass tokens. That […] [Original post on sfba.social]

One of the fun/annoying things about starting a pinball museum is the number of historical rabbit holes that I get caught up in. Today it's how this 1936 pinball machine led me to what looks like an MLM scheme from the 1920s and 1930s. A scam that still works today!

It's truly amazing what is news to the NYT and its readers. The top of today's home page is something I knew about Trump 10 years ago when he first launched his campaign. Welcome to the club, I guess?

Charlie Kirk was a martyr for free speech, which is why we're going to deport anyone who "makes light" of his death.

I missed this good news yesterday. TACO applies, and we apparently won't see Confederate troops on Union soil. https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/09/10/no-national-guard-in-chicago-after-all-trump-appears-to-sour-on-plan/

I've had a number of thoughts and feelings about Charlie Kirk, but where I land is: He did and said a lot of awful things, and owns his share of the enormous harm that he has enabled, including a lot of political violence. But he was also a human being, just like many of the people he helped […]

You know what's really going to reduce "the growing administrative burden of extensive emails"? Insisting that everybody use a machine that can turn a short amount of text into an extensive email. https://www.404media.co/hhs-asks-all-employees-to-start-using-chatgpt/

I love Know Your Meme because it lets me keep up with Internet nonsense without having to be terminally online. E.g.: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/whats-with-the-rooster-memes-and-jokes-on-twitter-the-guy-who-shot-a-rooster-to-protect-his-nephew-explained

Just used an app to request a prescription refill from my doctor. It said, "Please allow 72 business hours to process your request." Do they mean 9 days? Or do they work 24 hours a day? We'll find out!

Dave Karpf puts his finger on something here: "The 'Secret Master Plan' was meant to establish Elon as Tesla’s visionary main character. Mission accomplished." This is what has always bothered me about the common conception of CEO: they are seen as, and often strut around like, the company's […]

Weirdly, all the federal chaos has finally gotten me to agree with the (now nearly extinct) actual conservatives who thought the federal government was too big. The amount of damage MAGA is able to do is enormous. At this point, I think things like public health should be inter-state […]

This is glorious: https://www.readonlymemo.com/this-is-the-first-the-16-year-odyssey-of-time-money-wrong-turns-and-frustration-it-took-to-finally-emulate-the-pioneer-laseractive/

One of the side-effects of the AI bubble is that we stopped talking about alternative solutions to computing problems. Everything needs to be solved with "AI" - meaning an LLM - and nobody stops and asks if there is an alternative. This drives me mad because LLMs are not only unreliable, but […]

"Refusing to take no for an answer is abusive behavior," I whisper to the 17th "Maybe Later" button I've clicked today.

When was the last time somebody told you a joke? I miss them. Memes are fine, and I get and share a lot of humor that way. But the shift from performance to curation feels like it's losing something to me. I loved the skill of a well-told joke, and I liked trying my hand at it.