Durbin is weak, tired, puzzled, & his political habits are not right for this time. The Senate, partly by design, changes slowly but it will change. What the conscientious and pragmatic people in the USA do in the years to come will matter more than the waste and loss we are enduring now.

USA Bluesky has become corrosive this evening. I'm getting out of here for a while. "The drawbridge is drawn and it's going to stay drawn Till the milkman delivers the milk about dawn. I'm going to bed now, so nobody better Come round with a special delivery letter." -- Dr. Seuss

I never used it *directly*, just never felt I needed to and it didn't occur to me. But they gave me full-featured Copilot at work and I used that a few times to generate VBA macros and regex for data clean-up. It did well initially, then got worse & so annoying that now I just thug that out myself.

Browsing my mutuals with painful imposter syndrome thinking: Dear Lord, these people follow me, they see everything, why have they not blocked me yet

People just don't know how to properly prepare the armadillo and raccoon they could encounter for free on the highways of America

At this point I'm convinced that their already-written Trump obituary contains the words "you've got to hand it to him"

The big question for me - which I see little discussion about - is how their knowledge of his mental / physical health affects their behavior. Because a lot of powerful people are surely apprised of that. Are they more comfortable kneeling & kissing his ring because they expect he'll be gone soon?

New Yorkers really don't like to have to tell you "No" twice

It has always seemed to me that having the whole (*) country set clocks forward and back was an idea out of early 20C industrial-age railroad-timetable thinking. The sort of thing that, according to somebody in a green eyeshade, if imposed uniformly results in a "significant increase of efficiency."

I scrolled the replies looking for photos of the food served, but didn't see any. Sticking with my conviction that whatever it was, Gatsby would have served better, and had better booze.

The AWS outage seems to have just killed Copilot at my workplace. Free! I'm Free!

Did you ever check your feed on here and realize you have no idea what's going on?

At some point it stopped being about the Mayoral Campaign, and started being about trying to secure a position of some kind in the Trump Admin after he loses.

Mark Cuban has 1.4 million followers and anything he posts that I need to see will be pushed into my feed, so there is absolutely no need to follow him. Taking care of that now

Strange. I needed to renew my US passport, expecting that because of -- you know -- it would take even longer than the recommended 6 weeks. Did the application online, requested no special expedited service. The new one arrived in a week. Maybe they've automated the process?

"Nobody's Perfect" and "We Live in an Imperfect World" sound a lot alike, but the difference between them can be large and not understanding that seems to be a good tell for misplacing our trust and support.

The "you can just do things" presidency

There are good journalists at the New York Times. This sort of nonsense is entirely caused by editorial policy driven by a publisher who (1) is a wealthy financier and (2) fears Trump will take revenge by trashing his other business interests, if they print something bad about him in the newspaper.

I didn’t watch the Trump turd shitting video, not even the 25th time it was reposted into my feed by one of y’all

I went to the #nokings rally in my upscale white suburban Chicagoland town w a long history of racial exclusion (context). There were so many people the town square had no place left to stand, they were spilling across the roads. Families, grandmas, babies. It's 3 times the size of the one in June.

Fortunately there is an alternative well-configured for exactly this: The Everything App. You would be welcome there to share your views that certain people are getting out of line, asserting themselves too much, pushing into spaces where they aren't wanted, or ought to go back where they came from.

I suspect you don't mean this, because this site already has an immense range of voices, all you have to do is follow them. I think you mean to say this site would be better if some voices you like had the power to drive mass engagement, to post misogynist or racist vibes & get thousands of replies.

I'm only going to block them as they intrude on and annoy me, and otherwise ignore them. Nuclear block is not some kind of strut. Unless I do it when I'm right in the middle of a fight with them, they never even know.

Is it worth giving money to Wikipedia? I've heard for years that WP is run by Simpsons-video-store-guy obsessive jerks who memorize & over-interpret its myriad draconian rules to prevent others from correcting errors, etc. but alternately it's now a last bastion of non-slop content online. 🤔

Ongoing review of tea milking experiments: Nestle Nido (dry whole milk): works fine, old standby, know of only one shop that sells it & they're sometimes out. Costco oat milk: works well, have to haul it home in liquid form. Costco almond milk: a bit chalky, more for cereal etc. than tea imho

"The War of the Worlds" is the greatest science fiction novel ever written, and the greatest that ever will be written.

Pro: breakfast cereal for dessert as an alternative to ice cream. Con: breakfast cereal is worse for your health than ice cream.

Today I saw a bride and groom, with much joy and laughter, having their romantic photo taken coming together through adjacent turnstiles at a CTA station. Unfathomably based, and "Very Chicago"