The Lies of Locke Lamora - 4/5 Stars
I have been wanting to read this book for a while. In fact I tried a few years ago but bounced off it. Listening to it, via the Libby audiobook app, finally got me through the book. The style of the book takes some getting used to, it jumps back and forward in time which was part of what was offputting for me, but once I got settled I found it quite enjoyable.
There is a character, "Chains" (and whatever you are imagining for this character, I guarantee you are wrong.) I quite like this character and I kept imagining them portrayed by John Noble back in the early 2000s, when he played Denethor in the LOTR movies.
I'm onto the second book in this series, here's hoping it keeps my attention!
|
Road House (2024) - 2/5 Stars
Earlier this week the wife and I sat down to watch this movie on Amazon Prime. As ardent lovers of action movies, we expected to enjoy this one. It's definitely meant to be in the Fast & the Furious genre of the modern day, but truthfully we just found much of it dumb and disappointing.
Connor McGregor, as you might imagine, is not exactly destined for the silver screen. The plot has so many problems. And sadly the action scenes were largely just... disappointing.
Satisfied watching it on streaming rather than paying to see it in theaters.
|
"Jacob's Dream" - Lunch with the QAnon Shaman, the author delves deep in a shallow lake
I am loathe to give these burgeoning characters more attention, but this article on Harpers is excellent. The author sits down for lunch with Jacob, and truthfully the content is like 1/8th of the article, the rest is delving into past philosophy, logic, and conspiracy.
A quote about Jacob from the article:
Which would include January 6. When he reached the west side of the Capitol, he moved as if in a dream, gliding onto the Senate floor as if he were some fabulous pooh-bah whom no one had ever heard of yet. He ambled down the center aisle of the Senate chamber, past one hundred abandoned desks.
“Fuckin’ A, man,” he said.
“What then is the American, this new man?” J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked in 1782. At long last, Jacob provided the answer: He is a pagan straight out of central casting, a bro tripping on the hidden figures of the cosmos, a natural man convinced of his own self-evident truths, a hero ready to fight for his blessed fatherland, notwithstanding the fact that he still lived with his mother. Jacob stepped onto the dais, looked out on the sea of marble columns, and flexed his naked biceps.
A cop asked him to leave.
“I’m gonna take a sit in this chair,” he said. “’Cause Mike Pence is a fucking traitor.”
And on the inherent issue with overcoming the conspiracy theorist mindset, even when fact is against them:
With this intellectual lineage, conspiracy theorists are not about to back down from their truths, because their own scientific method possesses a historical claim as deeply entrenched as ours. And they have a point: their spooky correspondences, their spheres of influence, their invisible forces, their gravities and their magnetisms, their parsing of the invisible effluvia—without these, there never would have been any science at all. And that’s the reason reason has yet to dent the citadel of MAGA, and never will.
|
For the first time in literal months, I did some work under the hood on Glowbug.
- I turned off the BlueSky embed mechanism, given that bsky.link has become unreliable / gone down.
- I also finally fixed the issue with the JSON feed in case someone has been depending on it for the articles.
You're all welcome. Anything to keep the masses happy.
|
"The Untold Story of Japan's First People"
A great article (published in 2017) that introduced me to the Ainu people, the indigenous people on the island of Hokkaido who were largely erased from Japan by the government.
For much of the 20th century, Japanese government officials and academics tried to hide the Ainu. They were an inconvenient culture at a time when the government was steadfastly creating a national myth of homogeneity. So officials tucked the Ainu into files marked "human migration mysteries," or "aberrant hunter-gatherers of the modern age," or "lost Caucasoid race," or "enigma," or "dying race," or even "extinct." But in 2006, under international pressure, the government finally recognized the Ainu as an Indigenous population. And today, the Japanese appear to be all in.
I won't bother pulling excerpts as I'd be pulling most of the article. Lots of fascinating stuff in it.
|
Testing Threads.net Embeds
The drone dragon is awesome, but also I wanted to see if my code worked for embedding Threads posts on the blog.
Update: Well, that is anticlimactic. It works, but it's pointing you to Threads. What about a post which is not a video?
Yep, that's disappointing.
|
Hachyderm's server report says there are 36,143 peer instances for it on the Mastodon network. My blog runs a cron job which pings instances.social for the top 1000 instances by active users. I then capture any new ones from that list and add it to my list. As of tonight, my blog knows 2,417 of the instance domains. This represents just 6.7% of the network by instance quantity, but my estimate is that it is 90+% of the userbase.
This code enables my blog to automatically identify when I link to a post on Mastodon (admittedly, not something I'm doing a great deal of these days.) When it knows the link is for a Mastodon post, it can generate the code for embedding the post directly into the blog, rather than simply linking to it.
|
Automated Archives for March, 24th 2024
This post was automatically generated
Wallabag Additions
These are articles that which I saved today so that I may read them later. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
Chess For the Day
Record: 5-0-1
Net Elo Change: +22
Games Played
Blog Posts On This Day
- 1 year ago (2 posts)
|
