Category: Blog

  • LINK: We Didn’t Mean Be Mean To Us, Though.

    Mediaite:

    Watters took to the air on The Five to raise the case of his friend, a veteran of 20 years, who was months into a new role at the Pentagon and still under probation but discovered this week that his job was set to be terminated as part of DOGE’s initiatives.

    “But, see, what I meant wuz…”

    Nope. This is what you asked for.

  • Could someone inform the Fanta Menace that it takes some wind out of his argument about returning to the office when he spent almost a full year of his first term on a golf course (307 days), and has spent about 8 days of his 29 days so far on the links.

    Tell this idiot to have a Coke, a smile, and a fucking seat.

  • Today In ‘Today I Learned…’

    You’ll notice on the two previous posts that there is no title. I was going down a WordPress rabbit hole, and I ended up on Matt Mullenweg’s blog. Matt is a co-founder of WordPress, so I think he’s caught up on what it can do. I was surprised to see posts with no title there. So I tried it here, and damn. Had no idea. So, they’re tweets, more or less. I’m sure you could cross-post them that way. It got me thinking of all the half-baked things I could have put here instead of Elmo’s hellscape.

    Go figure

  • Virginia Beach is forecast to receive 6-10 inches of snow (fun size!), and with that we get a reminder of the dumbest fucking law ever.

  • Incontrovertible proof that we are snow-fucked here in Virginia Beach: Cantore is here.

  • YouTube And Podcasts

    The question is whether you should add your podcast to YouTube, especially if your podcast hasn’t embraced video. Here’s the post that got me thinking about it. I’ve added episodes of my podcast to YouTube as an audiogram previously, and while I’m not breaking any records I did see an increase in views and in time watched over the length of what I saw as an experiment. Since then, YouTube has fully embraced podcasts and has created features especially for podcasters. And yet…

    Here’s an argument against having podcasts on YouTube: It’s something you actively consume. Yes, there are channels like Lofi Girl that you can have on in the background, but that is my point. A podcast is something you can listen to while you’re doing something else, like driving, walking, or doing the dishes. Most of the time on YouTube, you’re watching a screen, and as much as other people might like to watch Joe Rogan be a meathead live and in living color, it just doesn’t seem like that was the idea Dave and Adam were getting at.

    That’s not to say that podcasts don’t belong on YouTube; I can think of at least one use case that works: Your Mom and Dad, who maybe wouldn’t know a podcast app if it slapped them, but they watch cat videos on YouTube. I’m only a little facetious here, but sometimes you lead people to new things through stuff people already know.

    The original poster posted some graphs of audience retention for audiograms versus video, and he made the point that audiograms lose their audience much faster. I don’t dispute that, but here’s something to think about: At that point, is what you’re watching a podcast, or is it a show?

    I think it’s a show. A show that CAN be a podcast, but it’s a show first. As always, your mileage may vary.

  • LINK: White House Admits Musk And DOGE Violated The CFAA

    Techdirt:

    …it’s a strategy that seems too cute by half and one that potentially creates more issues for Musk and DOGE than it purports to solve. Because the filing serves as a big neon sign saying that Musk had little authority.

    So then what the hell was he doing demanding that anyone from DOGE get access to the nation’s most sensitive computer systems?

    It certainly looks like it was access “without authorization” that the CFAA punishes because there was no authorization that this particular status as a White House employee could endow him with to entitle him, or his delegates, to the access they took.

    As it was in 1.0, their maliciousness is severely limited by their incompetence. I wouldn’t count on that being our saving grace, but it certainly helps.

  • A Small But Significant Site Update

    As you can see, before this post, I wrote one post with the date of that day. While this was convenient for me, I couldn’t direct you to a particular part of that post without anchor tags, and I just couldn’t make that work to my liking. In addition, the posts themselves weren’t as visible in search as they could be. If I’m going to open up comments on this site, then I think I need to blog ‘correctly’, whatever that means. Going forward, there will be separate posts for each, uh, post.

    Let us never speak of this again, we now return you to the clown show already in progress.

  • Friday, February 7th, 2025

    • It didn’t take long after opening comments on the blog for me to receive my first slice of spam. Sorry to disappoint you, my dude.
    • I will be guesting on my friend Justin’s podcast Deprogrammed this evening. It’s just a recording session today; I don’t know when it will drop. If this sounds familiar, I guested on this show last year about The Tragically Hip, a Canadian band more people should know. This time, it’s another small band from Canada—you might have heard of them.
    • Every so often I get the urge to give people some basic ideas on how to protect you and yours from fraud. Other more intelligent people have done so, I just see it a lot these days with my day job, and it’s sad sometimes. Today was one of those sad days. Please listen to those intelligent people when it comes to passwords, two-factor authentication, and not clicking on things from people you don’t know.

  • Thursday, Feb 6th, 2025

    • Overnight, I managed to catch the stomach bug that has brought down everyone else here. I don’t wish it on anyone. It does mean that I’ve spent most of today asleep under warm blankets, and irrigating myself like a TVA project when awake.
    • I did catch some of the performative holding of the floor overnight to postpone Russell Vought being confirmed at OMB. I mentioned on Bluesky that they shouldn’t stop. Sign up like a potluck dinner and hold floor indefinitely. Grind everything to a halt.