Can-Utility

He’d most likely have been the guy making out during Schindler’s List.

If your list of enemies includes the ADL, then there’s a more-than-reasonable chance that you’re an anti-semite.

Likewise if your loudest defenders are, themselves, loud and proud anti-semites.

Don’t stick your fork in the light socket!

Seems like the Venn diagram of those two groups approaches a circle, if the OP is any indication.

My first exposure to Ween was picking up a CD of Pure Guava when Push Th’ Little Daisies was taking over modern rock radio. I gave it a single spin and then ran away from Ween for the better part of 15 years or so. Quebec is the album that brought me back into the fold.

TBH I prefer the cohesiveness of The Mollusk but there are some astoundingly good songs on Quebec, even more if you fold the Caesar demos into the mix. I would have loved for a full-throated Ooh Va Lah on the album.

IANA tax attorney, and I’ve always had more time than losses, so I’ll defer to your wisdom 😅 I also didn’t claim he was smart …

At this point it’s foolish not to consider this as possibly the greatest tax writeoff in history. Elmo is setting himself up to never pay another dime in taxes the rest of his life. Not that he probably pays that much as it stands, but still.

I got to see this lineup twice (once in 2014, again in 2017). I’m sad I won’t see them again. Truly a legendary band, with some incredible music.

I don’t know if that’s across the board. I overwrote and deleted my accounts after Apollo shut down. Waited a week, checking in periodically, to see if any of my content made it back into my accounts. After a week of nothing resurfacing I felt safe deleting my accounts.

deleted by creator

If I still had my Reddit accounts I’d be P I S S E D

redirecting users to Lemon Party

I guess it’s true; the Fediverse is bringing people back to an earlier time of the internet!

I felt like he was very up front about how the current system, as unfriendly to users as it is, is what has made it possible for him to make a living doing what he loves to do. He even comes out at the end and says if big companies can’t figure out a post-advertising business model, they’ll likely die off, and that means he and people like him are out of a job, ‘and that’s probably the best scenario for users.’ Both ideas — that ad-funded internet ruined the internet, and that ad-funded internet allowed him and thousands of people like him to make a living on that internet — can be true at the exact same time.

TBH I feel like they really hit their stride performing in 1975-76. The Trick/Wind tours had a loose, jammy feel to them that’s irresistible.

Genesis’ Seconds Out is my favorite live album of all time. For people only familiar with the Phil Collins era of the band, it’s a perfect gateway to their brilliant past. Phil treats the Gabriel vocals with love and affection and really brings his all. Steve Hackett gives possibly some of his strongest work with the band. And the drum interplay between Collins and Chester Thompson (and, on one track, Bill Bruford) is :chef’s kiss:

Zappa/Mothers Just Another Band from LA showcases one of my favorite eras of the band, cut tragically short. The best, most complete rendition of Billy the Mountain until the release of the Carnegie Hall show

Fifteen to 20 years ago many people thought that the anonymity of the internet provided a permission structure for people to act incivilly. But if anything, the rise of social media has disproven that. People post the most incredibly toxic shit on Facebook or Twitter, often under their own names, right now. It’s not the relative anonymity, or lack thereof, that dissuades people from toxic behavior. It’s a collective action problem that rewards whatever the community (however defined) doesn’t rise up to stamp out.

Require a real ID (which sounds vaguely Orwellian where it doesn’t sound nebulous) and you’ll still get Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder and your uncle yelling transphobic trash on Twitter and Facebook and elsewhere. Places like Reddit and the fediverse are rapidly becoming outliers.

And as pointed out in OP, requiring all accounts tied to an identifiable person would be a disaster for people in abusive relationships, or who have a stalker, or other endangered persons. (Thinking back to Google Buzz and the ways it enabled online harassment and abuse before Google mercifully cut it showrt.)

The current, semi-anonymous, system is possibly the worst system devised, with the possible exception of all the others. No system is going to solve a collective-action problem. We, the collective, have to step up and fix it ourself.

(My understanding of Web 3.0 is limited to the crypto space, which seems inherently scammy; if there’s more to it than that, and I should be aware of it, I’d love to be educated.)

Have they ever released a multi-button mouse in the Macintosh era? I don’t think they have. Nowadays they only sell a no-button mouse :)

Lots to chew over in this piece. My knee-jerk reaction is to be opposed to any efforts to legislate against thoughtcrime, but I’m not insensitive to the effect deepfakes can have on the women targeted. Yet even saying “legislate” in the previous sentence isn’t quite right (nobody’s suggesting consumers of deepfakes should be prosecuted and imprisoned); what the article seems to suggest is a societal shift in approval vs. disapproval of one’s imagination — which is still alarming at a high level, but less so.

I also wonder if focusing on deepfakes as a unique problem isn’t a category error; AI is making all manner of false scenarios appear photorealistic, with ramifications society-wide. Maybe we need to confront the usage of this technology in general? IDK.

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WeEyncm_jQ

It’s taken me years to regain an appreciation for their post-Duke catalog. I was intensely negative on anything later for close to 15 years. Slowly I’ve been able to rediscover what it was about their later output that I initially liked, and maturity has smoothed out some of my own rough edges as well. I still find We Can’t Dance to be unbelievably limp and lifeless, though.