The earth shook today. I'm watching the news like everyone else after President Biden withdrew. There really is a lot happening very quickly, and the Dems all sound like they got their story straight, for once the Dems sound like a party. How did that happen. NakedJen says we need a miracle. I said that's her department. ❤️

A two-minute podcast where I dictate an op-ed the NYT should run in its own name, apologizing for trying to take over the US government, and promising to return to being a news organization.

I am so fed up with it. Today they ran an op-ed written by Aaron Sorkin giving advice to Democrats based on his experience writing scripts for a fictional White House television show in the late 90s and early 00s.

Yeah the NYT has lost its way. I hope some people down there think they're way out on a limb and it's time to get back to what they do. They are not qualified or entitled to do what they are doing.

One great use for ChatGPT, simple recipes.

If you try looking for a recipe on Google they take forever to get to the point, and pop up all kinds of offers when all you wanted was a checklist of ingredients and steps.

For example, how to make hard-boiled eggs.

Try doing the same thing on Google to see what I mean.

I trust that President Biden will do what's best for the country.

Pete Buttigieg should be the Democrats' official blogger. Every day a new insight into what makes people do what they do and why the Dems have all the right ideas. He's a perfect spokesperson in that role. A daily Pete. He should do it.

A 25-minute ramble with the themes of the Dreaming piece I wrote earlier today. Spoiler alert: I reveal the ending of the movie Casablanca. Respecting yourself means sticking to problems we can and need to solve, and work together. We can't make anything to happen until w...

Like it or not, Twitter is still the social web of record. This is something we need to fix. It's going to take a long time, but it has to start.

Isn't it surprising, with old age such an important topic, that we aren't learning more about it? I'm there now, myself -- immersed in it, can't escape it. I guess I didn't want to know about it until I had to. It's a real perspective-shift.

Some coffee notes for a Saturday morning. This election is a total mess. Trump is extremely beatable. Biden is extremely beatable too. We've all had a chance to live in an America with Trump as president, and Biden. I know which one was better for all of us. (Evidence: our...

Historically it's unjustifiable. The NYT et al are grievously wrong, and that should be reflected on their op-ed pages. We've been here before, this is as much a hack as Hillary's Emails. Maybe you can't see it now, but win or lose, people are going to look at this period when we all lost our minds.

I posted the above piece around the social web, I like the way it looks on Threads the best.

An eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer's show today. The first half is an interview with Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all age...

Now that Elon Musk is giving so generously, dollars and flow, to the fascists, he's encouraging more of us to use Zuckerberg's twitter-like system, aka Threads. But Zuck isn't making it go down easy. There's a piece in Bloomberg (paywall) that says Trump is badass but isn't supporting either candidate. What could possibly go wrong?

Matt says some interesting new stuff is coming from Automattic now that WordPress 6.6 is out. Something for writers? Perhaps something that moves WordPress into a space adjacent to twitter-like systems? They just added support for Threads to WordPress, so now you can crosspost from a blog to a thread. Haven't tried it yet. They also have a new identity system built around Gravatar, announced in early June. It'll be interesting to see what they come out with. I wonder if there is a developer ecosystem building on this, and if they have an evangelism program. I have my own vision of how these things should work.

If the world doesn't know you did something you might as well not have done it. This is what Doug Engelbart learned, and what we learned in his aftermath. He is known for inventing the mouse, because that's the one thing he invented everyone knows about. He also developed software that pioneered using a computer to organize your ideas. For the most part people don't know about that because (I guess) most people don't organize their work?

I'm avoiding the actual RNC, the speakers are just actors. Trump looks like the Queens kid he is. People from Queens don't feel like we really belong, except with other Queens people. We expect to be thought of as the kid from Queens. I know this so well. So the "boss" slumps around not sure what to do or say. He's not gregarious. Not in charge of anything.

Nancy Wicklund Gonzalez: "I’ve had to switch to watching the BBC. American news is unwatchable. Between the lionization of a sociopath and the denigration of a decent man, I just can’t even."

Today's song: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).

The Repubs can win by throwing the election into the House. They can probably get it by the courts in enough places, just a couple of swing states, and they win even if they lose by normal vote-counting methods. The whole bit about Biden's age is meant to distract us from the fact it probably doesn't matter how old the Democratic candidate is.

A podcast about listening to the podcasts from 2004.

This is a short episode about what I learned, and what's coming up.

Humbling experience.

Highly recommend this Netflix series -- esp the last three episodes. I found it enlightening, even though I lived through most of this history, I never saw it all put together in a series of events over decades. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective of where we are in the Cold War. It never was over. "The end of history" was too good to be true. Also glad I read so much about slavery a few years ago. If you put both these together, you get the USA, and the deep and lasting wounds we keep re-opening.

Today's adventure: "The great and cute Wordle Kitty was surprisingly chosen to be the running mate of the most popular presidential candidate in the history of the United States, who happens to also be very very old so that’s why they nominated the cute little cat to be the vice president because she is so young and so incredibly cute."

And btw, don't panic. You can't accomplish anything that way.

The problem with JD Vance is that he's empty inside, he'll be whatever he needs to be to get more power, and he's young. He's as empty as Trump, and much younger, so we can't hope to outwait him. Now we have a real problem, because Trump has a successor. I imagine Trump's so...

Shownotes for the Podcast0 from July 16, 2004.

NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.

Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like Up In The Air or Michael Clayton, but we don't know anything about his political judgement. He hasn't done anything to tell us who he is ...

We. Need. To. Organize. Democrats should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of John Gruber. F...