When your house is on fire there aren’t two sides.

If only voters understood that government isn't a TV show.

I think it's probably too late, anyway. Journalism should have reported, constantly, that the house is on fire. And nothing else. Biden's age didn't enter into it you fools. The much bigger story was and is that Hitler wants to be president, and this time he has a plan. It was true then and it's true now. The next question is what will Biden do if Trump wins. It was tough watching Obama greet Trump at the White House in 2016. I can't see Biden doing that. I wonder what ideas they're workshopping in the actual Situation Room.

Last night I was surprised to see Wolf Blitzer reporting, on CNN, on all the worst things Trump has said, with supporting video. On CNN, one of the worst sanewashing sources for our would-be despot. I can't imagine what happened there. Or maybe I can. Is it possible that the ...

Bob Sassone writes via email:

• You said on your blog that you can't imagine moving from WordPress because "there isn't anything else out there that's offering something new for the writers." What about Ghost?

My response:

• Sorry it wasn't clear -- but as far as I know, Ghost isn't built on WordPress. It's a completely different product.
• My writing tool runs on WordPress. So you can use it with your existing wordpress.com sites.
• And the codebase I've built will support lots of editors built using WordPress as the backend.

A place to ask questions.

Bob's site is bobsassone.com.

Yesterday I posted a bit about the "million-plus Americans who died from Covid during Trump's tenure." It wasn't worded carefully enough, I should've had a lawyer review it. Yes, a lot of them died during Biden's tenure too. But I don't think of it that way. I think of the bi...

Yesterday I posted a bit about the "million-plus Americans who died from Covid during Trump's tenure." It wasn't worded carefully enough, I should've had a lawyer review it. Yes, a lot of them died during Biden's tenure too. But I don't think of it that way. I think of the b...

I'm continuing to develop on WordPress. I see the opportunity regardless of what else is going on. I could be wrong, I have been before. I kept using Twitter for identity after Musk took over, even though as time went by it was increasingly obvious that developers weren't p...

Don’t depend on Threads to validate the Fediverse. That’s not what they’re doing. Some of the people working there have good hearts and mean well, but Meta is a huge company, competing with other huge companies, and the goals of the Fediverse do not show up in their roadmap.

I got a notice that Threads had deleted one of my posts because they said it violated their rules. They thought I was claiming to have written something I had not written. I didn't keep the notice (it popped up when I signed on). I shrugged it off when I got it, but then realized that we are very far away from the web. It has been turned into Disneyland where the cops are algorithms and they err on the side of stopping innocent things. I was just passing on a link to someone else's blog, something I thought an informed person would want to know about (that's the idea behind every link I share). We really do need to dig our way out of this hole, again. This is of course no better than Twitter or Facebook. Not a place to get work done.

It's amazing that the million-plus Americans who died from Covid during Trump's tenure aren't even mentioned as a campaign issue. Maybe people don't want to be reminded of those dark days.

Last night the Mets were eliminated by the Dodgers playing in Los Angeles, so the good news is we don't have to tear down Citi Field. And I don't know about you but I'm really happy how the season turned out. I didn't think the mets would make it through any of the hurdles, ...

A second elimination game for the Mets tonight. I almost don't want the Mets to win, because the World Series opponent from the "other" league are the Janks from the Bronx. I love the Bronx. That's about all I have to say about that at this time.

I did a podcast this morning about the reality of Musk owning Twitter, which is now completely settling in. He might have enough influence on the election to push Trump over. He wins even if Trump loses, he gets a moon mission project to boot up a Musk Party. It's coming for sure, either way. Probably will pick up what's left over after Trump, who clearly is losing it, and even if he's president, someone else will be pulling the strings. I can't imagine the billionaire will let JD Vance do it. And by "billionaire" I mean Musk.

Some of us do most of our writing on desktop computers. I guess we're in a very small minority. We can use a much better twitter-like system than the people who use mobile devices to tweet. I'm one of the desktop people. So I want textcasting. Mobile people either don't care or don't want it. So it stands to reason we need a different user interface. We can use the same network, we just need a different UI for editing. Since the twitter-like systems already carry links to stories written by people on desktops, there's room in their pipes for our writing too. And it can work more efficiently if the stories are part of the message as opposed to living off-site. Think of it as a web of writing. A writer's web that also carries short messages.

I asked ChatGPT to illustrate my post. Not bad. Very colorful!

It's possible the Dodgers let the Mets win as I begged them to yesterday, but it's also possible the Mets just crushed the Dodgers, but either way, the Mets are still in it. The series is now 3-2, and returns to Los Angeles tomorrow. So we don't have to tear down Citi Field after all. If the Dodgers win it'll be in their own stadium. The Mets were magnificent! Absolutely inspiring. A three-run home run by Alonso started things off. Everyone got on base. Doubles and triples. It wasn't without the concern that our wonderful and lovable Mets would do the usual Mets thing and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but they held out. The final score was 12-6. We're still in it. Lets go Mets!

Eugen Rochko, the lead developer of Mastodon: "Fediverse integration in Threads is still in a sorry state over a year since launch. They need to be able to follow us back. They need to see when we mention them. Those are such basic things." They got what they wanted, they got the users and press to relax because they’re Facebook who we know, but this is different, it’s the fediverse. And they got Eugen and others to validate them. This always works, standard tech playbook. they give up nothing, then the priority changes. I don't like being right. But they're never going to change in Silicon Valley. They do what works, and take advantage of newcomers who want to believe.

Imagine the editorial the NYT runs the day after the election when Trump wins and it dawns on them that it's really over. For good. No backsies. We're going down. Sayonara. Thanks for the memories. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when.

Will the NYT make it through the election without running an editorial that says clearly if we elect this mad king fascist and give him nukes and our military, and our industrial might, and what remains of our virtue, then we deserve the hell that will rain down on us. If this were a Hollywood movie, we'd be waiting for the climax, but I have a feeling they will exit existence with a whimper rather than a fist held high in solidarity.

Bloggers, here's an idea. When you write a piece you're proud of, end it with a sentence like this: "And that's why I have a blog." It plants a seed, which through repetition and appearing in many places, might help people appreciate the purpose of a blog. We've had a lot of mud slung at us, let's start undoing that.

There's this great story in the Fargo TV series where one of the villains says there's a point when an animal that has been captured, and relaxes when it realizes that it is no longer a being and has become food. At some level food knows it's food. Evolution has been kind to us that way. At what point in last night's game did you realize that the Mets were no longer a baseball team and had become food?

The Dodgers soiled our lovable slumping Mets last night. It was a sad sight. One to forget as soon as possible. And don't forget folks, there's always next year. If I were the Dodgers, I'd expect the Mets to win tonight, and the Dodgers will probably begrudgingly go along wi...

One of the things that makes me want to see Automattic stick around and grow is that they have a really large codebase that has been scaled, debugged and maintained for over 20 freaking years. And the most important thing -- they don't break users. The code I wrote to run ag...

I made the reallySimple package for Node.js because I wanted to make it as easy as possible to read feeds in Node apps. It should be as easy as reading a file. Give it the URL of a feed, get back a JavaScript object that's as simple as feeds are. It can read RSS, Atom and RDF feeds, but you get the same object regardless of what form the feed was in. I'm up for creating some example apps if you're interested. There is a very simple Hello World app included in the package and a set of demo apps. It's MIT-licensed, so you can do whatever you want with the code. It would lovely to see it ported. The idea is to plant some seeds in the Node.js world to make it easy for developers to try out new ideas with feeds, figuring the easier it is, the more people will do it. Be creative. Blow our minds! :-)

The question has come up in various contexts, is a Substack feed a blog? Yes, I think it can be. For some reason people thought I'd say no. In 2003, I compiled a list of things that make a blog a blog, and it's not about the software you use, rather it's about who's writing it, and whether they're being edited. Now it's a different question to ask if I would use it. I would not. Because it forces you to use their editor. And that's a pernicious form of lock-in. It might sound like a small thing, but it means you can't easily try out something new. You are not available to other software developers as a possible user, so no software will be designed for you. I know how well that kind of system works. And that's probably why they lock you into using their editor. If I can't switch without breaking everything, I'm not going there.

Mathew Ingram asks if AI will save us or kill us. It could both save and kill us. That's what's so disturbing about evolving. We live such short lives, people aren't really design to evolve, but because of medicine and other tech, we are often forced to do it. Evolution can c...

I keep writing on my hybrid WordPress/Mastodon blog at my kitchen table. This morning I wrote about why I don't believe in the Ya Gotta Believe, a baseball slogan coined by a 1973 Mets pitcher Tug McGraw. It's on-topic because the Mets are in a challenging series with the Do...

Gruber gave me an idea when he put his NYY logo on his blog. I thought that was both interesting and weird. I don't get how anyone I know can be a fan of the that team. An American League team in a National League city. Kind of like rooting for Staten Island. Anyway, the Yankees may win the ALCS, but what does it mean? It's not going to make New York love them. But then Gruber is in Philadelphia so why isn't he thinking about the Phillies, who btw, the Mets beat soundly in the division series, earlier this month. In any case, I have made the team picture of the 1969 world champion Mets as the banner image on Scripting News for now and into the forseeable future.