Extinct, not dead

YouTube video by NPR Music Bad Bunny: Tiny Desk Concert

good listening for a day such as today

m.youtube.com/watch?v=ouuP...

I love this book.

YOUR RING CAMERA IS AN ICE AGENT [a drawing of a ring camera with an ice agent dragging a person away in its field of vision] "In October of 2025, Amazon's Ring announced its partnership with FLOCK, an A.I. surveillance group that freely shares its footage with ICE, the secret service, and the navy. Flock customers can use A.I. tools to sift through footage to assist in all manner of operations (like raids and deportations) without a warrant. Unplug Ring! Melt ICE! Protect your neighbors! See: https://blog.ring.com/about-ring/ring-expands-community-requests-to-additional-community-safety-partners/ https://www.404media.co/ice-secret-service-navy-all-had-access-to-flocks-nationwide-network-of-cameras/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ https://www.aclum.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out-resource-guide/

jack asked if i would sketch up a poster to tell people in nearby neighborhoods about the partnership between flock and ring, and this is what i came up with. it can be printed on an 8.5x11 sheet of paper.

Ring has been very very cooperative, even proactively helpful, to law enforcement (and getting more so by the day). We already know they have a form cops can fill out to get access to footage without warrant or permission in an “emergency” as determined by them. What will this mean for new features?

Fantastic deep dive into all the details and symbolism in the halftime show.

Oh sweet. The wedding is adorable but also, getting a haircut during the halftime show?! This is sportsball at its finest. 😁

the soft launch of mass surveillance.

don’t fall for it.

Yeah that is horrifying

kind of funny there are prob 1,000 major US musicians and every time conservatives need to put up a music artist to counter a mainstream narrative, they put up kid rock. "ok here's kid rock again" for the next 30 years, an octogenarian man in jean shorts rapping something from the 1990s

The deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society. The privacy issues are not fixable with regulation and there is no balance that can be struck. Ring should be shut down immediately and not brought back.”

I come back to this open letter (from 2020) a lot, and I’ll give it the last word. amazonemployees4climatejustice.medium.com/amazon-emplo...

This is fascinating - I had never heard of the game, which sounds lovely. And I have been in conversations where the topic *almost* tipped toward (Current Political Awful Guy) but we all veered away again because then the conversational game would effectively be over!

Mr.D jokingly asked if i wanted to “watch the game” & i said, but we finished “Dispatches from Elsewhere“!

A Mandaic curse bowl in the Royal Ontario Museum. It has a spiraling Mandaic text that leads to an encircled x at the center.

This Super Bowl Sunday, I’d like to introduce you all to the magical curse bowls used in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria in late antiquity. Written in Mandaic (as here) or Syriac Aramaic, they trap demons who trespass on a household by sucking them in with spiraling spells to the center of the bowl.

a small owl is sitting on top of a green carpet . Alt: a small owl sits on a green perch with a person's hand gently petting it. When the person places their hand on the owl's head, it closes its eyes, looking comfortable and happy.

May all your owls be superb, today and every day

The March for Life bringing measles to DC feels like another thing that would be written for a satire but since satire is dead it's reality.

Young Anton Chekhov, the playwright, looking super hot in his 20s

Wait, THIS is young Anton Chekhov? This? Good lord. Let that gun go off, daddy

I think I mentioned this before, but I hope my all fellow Gen Xers have a recent measles booster. I discovered I was below immunity level after my doctor thought I should get tested. (And it won’t hurt you to get one even if you don’t need to.)

There are zillions, whining about how hard it is. “Stare at the page until drops of blood” etc.

In my experience, talent is a *detriment* to learning.

I didn't have to practice early on so I *didn't know how*. I didn't start to learn how to practice until my 30s! (When much of my life was taken up with parenting, so I didn't have time!)

I didn't start to improve as a musician until my 40s!

Digital illustration in a black and white graphite style. An anthropomorphic hot dog with mustard wearing a straw boater, gloves, big wingtip shoes, and carrying a cane is doing an outrageous strut. The background is piled with the phrase ’ maybe it will happen today’.

Look: An Unexpected Arts Experience in Arlington, Virginia — Look: An Unexpected Arts Experience In an uncertain world, art matters . . . embrace creativity, community, and fun at this POP-UP Programmed Art Gallery in a vacant commercial space in Arlington. Over three weekends, the transformed sp...

Upcoming art thing in Arlington, VA. www.lookarlington.com/about

You know, when I think about the people complaining that they can’t make art without AI because they don’t have the resources, I will now always think about how Douriean Fletcher started out by making jewelry with things she found at Home Depot. Brass wire, copper flashing, bamboo.

Just because good news is worth celebrating:

There is now a Prep medication that is an *every six month* injection.

HIV has, effectively, a vaccination.

This Clever Phishing Scheme Makes Fake Websites Look Legit This new phishing scheme uses lookalike characters (homographs) to trick users into thinking a malicious URL is legit.

Just now learning about “homoglyphs” — though I was an atavistic defender of serifs long before the current age of “Weird A.I.” … lifehacker.com/tech/this-cl...

This New Hotel Reservation Scam Is Fooling People Who Use Sites Like Booking.com If you've booked a hotel through a platform like Booking.com or Expedia, beware any communication that directs you to confirm your payment details to hold your reservation.

A scammer just tried exactly this on me via WhatsApp. Glad I saw a post here recently outlining the scam - it would be very easy to fall for. The “hotel” account had an unconvincing name, but they had my name, number & reservation dates. lifehacker.com/money/hotel-...

I wish I had received (& heeded) this advice long ago. Instead I had so many gleefully miserable quotes from writers who seemed to hate doing it. (Assemblage sculpture I actually like doing.)

Accidentally found a Sandman reference in Wikipedia that has NG borrowing Shakespeare’s Titania but fails to catch that, in partnering her with Auberon, he is actually stealing from Little, Big.

I would definitely read this story/ watch this limited series!

Somehow this struck me as a Stranger Things “upside-down” chest freezer and now I want them to make one that is more so.

"On one hand, here's this actual thing happening in pop culture. On the other hand, here's some wet garbage we found while searching behind that abandoned dumpster in the woods where all those kids died of tetanus last year. Which will be more popular? We asked two rabid raccoons."