🔗 The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers:

We got to do it in spaces where people who aren’t already like us exist.

I think that’s one trap people fall into. They want to say, “Okay, I’m going to engage politically, I’m going to contribute to this organization.” That can be effective in its own way. But it’s not doing the identity work unless it’s reaching out beyond, unless it’s having an impact. Reaching, involving, engaging, bringing people in who are not already on that side. Because we’re so sorted geographically, in institutions, in professions, we rarely encounter people like that anymore. But there are still places, and we have to find them. We have to not necessarily have a direct discussion — “You and I disagree about this, let’s hash it out.” That’s not going to work. It’s about connecting on other levels first to build trust and bring people in that way. Maybe over time, people are attracted to that.

This whole interview is really interesting and important (of course I would think that, because I am dispositionally inclined to do so 😂), but I think this part is the most important. I wish that they had not left it for the very end of the conversation when they were just about out of time.

For sure, I think that getting out and engaging with and working with people with whom we already mostly agree is a step in the right direction, and it is better than not doing anything. Even working with people in our own camp, it is likely we will find areas where we do not agree; working through those differences on friendly ground is good practice.

The overall point of Bagg’s work, though, is that we cannot bring people around to our point of view by reasoning and objective facts. This is exactly why I get so frustrated by claims that voters vote the way they do because they are misinformed, or are dumb, or lack critical thinking skills. People vote differently from you because they have a different understanding of the world, they trust a different set of experts, and they prioritize different things.

I get why people want to focus on framing arguments or debunking or whatever. It offers the promise that if we just say things in the right way, people will come around to our way of thinking. It also reinforces the idea that we are the ones who are right, and that that rightness is based on some sort of objective truth. It absolves us of the need to make and defend our judgements about the world—we’re just right, see?—because what we believe is true and what the other people believe is false.

But people tend to believe what they do because of how they were raised, their experiences in the world, and the groups with which they identify. We are not going to change that by dunking on them, or by coming up with just the right logical argument, or by getting the right set of facts in front of them. To change that stuff, we have to change their experiences of the world, and that is long, slow, difficult work, and it probably mostly done by forging personal connections in the real world.

It will probably all be gone tomorrow, but in the meantime, this little bit of snow we are getting tonight is pretty nice. 

 I ordered a pair of jeans last week because all my current pairs have started busting holes in the knees.

I don’t know if the planets aligned or there was some other sort of cosmic confluence, but they arrived today and they are exactly what I look for in a pair of jeans. The size and fit are perfect, and I am pretty picky when it comes to jeans.

Now I feel like I need to order nine more pairs, because I am pretty sure I will never be able to get them again.

I feel like I run into this sort of thing more and more these days, where I find something that I like and need to get a bunch of whatever it is because the next batch that rolls off whatever just-in-time production line will be different, or because the company that makes whatever the thing is will stop making it. I imagine it also may have something to do with the fact that I am getting older and more set in my ways.

I stopped in at the local game shop to do a bit of Christmas shopping this afternoon. I was delighted to find the place hopping, and not just with the usual nerds playing at the tables in the back. Good to see local businesses getting a lot of traffic.

On the downside, the one person working the register was getting asked a ton of questions by some guy who was very particular about a bunch of dice or some shit in the glass case under the counter. Like, I don’t know man… they’re dice and you roll them and get numbers?

I was glad I didn’t have anywhere I needed to be, and reconfirmed in overall my life decision to not really be into gaming.

Update: I found the original post that inspired this one! It’s “Being quietly radicalised by being on holiday” by Matt Webb and you should go read it; he says it all much more eloquently than I.

As of 5 PM EST this past Friday, I am officially off work until after the first of the year, which is pretty great. I don’t hate my job, but it’s better not having to go to it 8-10 hours a day, five days a week, and for my time to be my own.

Every year at this time, I am reminded of a post from a few years back—I’ll have to look it up—that was something to the effect of “the radical effect of being on holiday.” The gist was that going on vacation for more than a few days gives those of us lucky enough to be able to do it a glimpse of what it would be like to have a world where we—none of us—has to work all the time.

There have been a million posts about how the future we were promised, where automation and technology frees us up to pursue our interests and hobbies, has never come to pass. Instead, the investor class has used those tools to make us all work even harder and more desperately and to pit us against one another, while at the same time stripping away all of the social support infrastructure that we had built up to help us through harder times.

And I should be clear… I have it really easy as these sorts of things go. My job is gives me reasonable hours, and it pays me pretty well and allows me to work from home. Nearly every day, I think about how lucky I am in my situation, where I can afford a house and food to eat and nice stuff, and I can go for walks around the block when the weather is nice, and I can drive my kids to school and pick them up. And I get a decent amount of time off (at least for a US employer). I could have things A LOT worse. Plenty of people do have it a lot worse.

Even so, when I am off for more than a day or two, it always makes me think that it should always be like this.

I’m not talking about that “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” bullshit, either. That’s a con—a scheme to trick people into selling out their hobbies and their passions and their creativity to make a living. No, what I mean is that we shouldn’t have to work all the time. We shouldn’t have to work for someone else and have the value of our labor stolen, and we shouldn’t have to “work for ourselves,” i.e., chase some own-your-own-business scenario where you are at work ALL THE TIME and constantly on the brink of failure with nothing to catch you when if you fall.

And yet we all keep doing it, spending huge portions of our days, weeks, and lives going to off to jobs we hate that, or jobs we tolerate, or even just jobs that fine but which still take our time and our energy but would drop us in a hot minute as soon as it is in their interest to do so. Meanwhile, the trillions of dollars generated by all the work that we do get sucked up by a ever-narrowing sliver of society.

Time off from work too often gets framed (usually by the people “giving” us that time off) as a chance to recharge or recover or whatever. I say bullshit. Time off from work is an escape, an opportunity to imagine a better world where our time is ours and we can use our time and energy how we choose rather than having someone else choose for us.

🔗 Streaming music is the lie we tell each other:

I’ve come to the conclusion that streaming music platforms are a shared lie we all agree to that suggests we’re paying for music when we’re actually may as well be pirating it, we just pay $10 a month to keep the cops away.

Yeah, pretty much.

The lie I tell myself is that my streaming subscription is the way I discover new music, but that implies that once I find new music I like, I then go buy it.

While this is not exactly an excuse, I did actually hit Bandcamp earlier today to buy a few albums off my 2025 favorites list. Unfortunately, the CDs were sold out for all of them. I went with the downloadable files option, but now that leaves me with more stupid digital media I have to deal with.

Mr. Beans is ready for Christmas.

🔗 Typing is my business.:

I would never advocate for replacing the liberal arts with pure vocational training, but many of the most important classes of my middle and high school education were the eminently practical ones. And none were more practical than my 8th-grade Keyboarding course.

I assume they called it keyboarding because someone (erroneously) believed that it needed to be distinguished from the typewriter-oriented “Typing” course it had replaced. The year was 1993 and the scene was a lab full of classic Macintosh computers with black-and-white screens. The teacher was a veritable drill sergeant, barking commands and enacting strict discipline as we completed the most rote exercises of our middle school years. I was fortunate enough to have had access to computers at home, but I was (despite some furtive efforts by my parents) still an inveterate hunt-and-peck typist. That changed in Mr. Griggs’s class. The posture was stifling, the exercises were grueling, and the corrections were brutal. In that small-town school computer lab, I was born again hard. I was a touch typist.

I can relate.

To this day, I think one of the most important classes I ever took was “Freshman Workshop” my first year of high school. In a room at the end of the hallway on the third floor, twenty of us at a time sat a fleet of Olympia typewriters and learned to touch-type. It was tedious and grueling work, but by the end of it, I could type relatively accurately and quickly.

For the second semester of that first year, we moved downstairs to the computer lab for “PC Workshop”, where we learned the basics of getting up and running on the IBM PC: basic DOS commands at first, and then on to word processing with PC Write.

Being decidedly middle-aged, I will admit that there is a part of me that wants to say “We need to go back to teach kids typing!” Handwriting, too, while we’re at it. The rest of me, however, realizes that I hate when curmudgeons shout stuff like that, and I don’t want to be one of those people. So while I do not think this is only a me thing—plenty of other people seem to share my affinity for typing—but I do think a lot of it is an of-its-time thing. Thirty years from now, the kids of today will be shouting about how everything was better when they were growing up.

To this day, though, I remain grateful that I had to take those classes. I love typing, be it on a manual typewriter or a computer keyboard. Having learned to type early, it has never been a struggle for me to physically commit words to page or screen, and that has let me focus on the real work of making the words themselves. It made school easier, it has made all of my jobs easier, and it makes writing easier.

I also just find it satisfying in a very tactile way. I think Max is right that there is something important about finding ways to make the ephemeral digital stuff we create real by giving it presence in the physical world. Using a keyboard is part of that, in the same that pen and paper are.

🔗 The algorithm hates me.:

No, I think the real story was that I was making an error about the very idea of what the Twitter algorithm was for. I assumed, naively, that the algorithm was designed to show me things that I would like, things that I would have an affinity for, or at the very least things that were good (or, good’s proxy, popular). And if we assume that the algorithm is there to show us good stuff that we would like, it’s fair to assume it will show our best stuff to people who would like us.

But it doesn’t. What Twitter cared about was engagement. Making you laugh, making you mad, making you happy, making you sad, making you horny, making you anxious—it’s all ultimately the same, as long as it gets you to engage, to interact, to keep opening the app and scrolling.

💯

That is what all of the social media platforms care about, and it is why the “If you give us all your data, we’ll show you things that interest you” deal is a big fat lie. You’re trying to bet against the house, and the house always wins. These platforms’ entire public justification for their existence–their core value proposition–is bullshit.

🔗 Abominations of Capital - by Hamilton Nolan:

To gaze at the amazing gift that Basquiat gave to the world in the form of art and then to reflect that one asshole can, if he chooses, light that artwork on fire for his own amusement, or stash it forever aboard a yacht, or sell it off to an even less appreciative plutocrat in order to fund the purchase of another penthouse apartment is to begin to understand the way that wealth inequality is disease of our collective soul. Democracy is an attempt to create some level of political equality, to mirror the inherent moral equality of all humanity. This is simply not possible in the presence of the level of wealth inequality that America now has. It is not possible. We can have our level of inequality or we can have a democracy but we cannot have both. The numbers, at present, tell us that we have chosen the inequality. We are just playing out the string on the rest right now.

There is no argument you can make that anyone needs the amount of money that the investor class in the US has. I’m not even necessarily an “Eat the rich” kind of guy (although I’m not sure I am 100% opposed to that sort of solution); let people have $500 million. Tax anything above that at 97%.

There is so much money sloshing around in our financial system, and yet it is overwhelmingly accruing to banal shitheads that buy great art because they can. Meanwhile, they are burning down our democracy for fun.

Okay, maybe I’m talking myself around to “Eat the rich.”

🔗 Remember Decency? – Digby’s Hullabaloo:

Policy advocacy signs are too easily dismissed. “Fund Public Education,” “Defend Social Security,” and such, declare what policies the protester advocates and directs others to support as well. They’re forgotten in seconds. I prefer to ask commuters to think instead. If they have to ask, “What’s that about?’ then mission accomplished. Rather than tell them what I think, messages like “ARE YOUR GROCERIES CHEAPER?” invite them to engage the question. “YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD” asks them to consider why and what might be done.

🔗 Beacon Hill’s new rules are good. They should follow them.   - CommonWealth Beacon:

Beacon Hill Tracker, a new citizen-created dashboard, paints a very mixed picture. The new site tracks whether committees are following these new rules: publishing committee votes, posting bill summaries, providing sufficient meeting notice, and adhering to reporting deadlines.

For the 8,868 bills analyzed as of this writing, committees broke at least one of these new rules for a slim majority of them (50.9 percent, or 4,513 bills). A mere 725 bills showed no violations. For the rest, it’s too soon to tell.

We are one of the bluest states in the US, with Democrats controlling both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office. We ought to be a beacon and a leader for the rest of the country, but instead, we have a legislature that barely does anything and is notoriously opaque.

I am pretty skeptical that the House and Senate will carry through on any of the commitments they have made to transparency absent pretty intense pressure from the public.

I have been saying for a few years now how I wish there were a mechanical pencil that combined the heft and feel of a Rotring with the Uni Kuru Toga’s lead-turning mechanism. I have tried a bunch of different models, but had not been able to find one that fit the bill. And that was fine, because the Rotring and the Kuru Toga are both great pencils as they are.

Nonetheless, I was quite interested when I was on the JetPens site last week and happened to notice that Uni now offers a metal-body version of the Kuru Toga, and immediately ordered one.

The pencil arrived on Monday, and I have been using it a bunch the last few days. I quite like it. It is still not quite as solid-feeling as the Rotring, but that is a high bar. It is a major step up from the rest of the Kuru Toga line, though, and I think it may become my go-to pencil for daily use.

It remains to be seen how this pencil holds up over time, but I am just really impressed with it.

Over the weekend, a bunch of people were linking to a post by someone who got locked out of their Apple account and has now lost access to all of their Apple devices and iCloud data.

First, that sucks and I feel bad for this person.

Second (and this is not intended as a defense of or apology for Apple), this is exactly the kind of weird edge-case thing that can happen when massive companies build big, complex technical systems and operational processes that are designed to support millions of users.

Third, to all the people responding “And this is why you should self-host,” ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!

Self-hosting is not a solution to any of this.

If you self-host, great! Nicely done, and I am glad that it is (mostly) working for you. I say “mostly” because I would bet that somewhere you’ve got a thread or blog post (maybe several!) about your frustrations with your setup and all the hoops you have had to jump through to get it working and keep it working.

Most of the people writing these paens to self-hosting take the cost and trouble for granted, because many of them are already self-hosting their stuff and were inclined to do so in the first place.

And sure, I know there are all sorts of things that are good about self-hosting, that it works for a subset of people, and that the options otherwise are not great. But as a general solution to people’s tech problems and the centralization of our communications and data infrastructure, self-hosting is so far beyond the reach of most people that it is not really even worth considering.

And TBH, I increasingly feel like if we are going to chase unreachable destinations on principle, the better destination is a place where we are all much less dependent on dragging around these huge and ever-growing piles of digital information. That it is theoretically possible to have access to every photo you’ve ever taken, every song you have listened to or want to listen to, every post you’ve ever written, every book you’ve read and step you’ve walked does not mean that your should, or that you are better off for being able to.

If you want a middle ground, we should be building small, sustainable, community-based hosting where the intent is to provide the basic infrastructure and support necessary to connect actual humans. The problem, of course, is capitalism, which insists that everything must be consolidated and scaled so as to create maximum short-term profit for whoever owns it.

 🔗 Last Call for Mass Market Paperbacks:

The decision made this winter by ReaderLink to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,” notes Stuart Applebaum, former Penguin Random House EVP of corporate communications. Applebaum was also once a publicist at Bantam Books, one of the publishers credited with turning mass market paperbacks into what he calls “a well-respected format.”

Like many readers of my age, I have a fondness for mass market paperbacks. Mass markets were the vast majority of the books I read during my formative reading years and I still have a bunch of them on my shelves.

If I set aside the warm glow of nostalgia for a minute, though, I can admit that the low price and ubiquity of the format was not without its tradeoffs. The paper and ink are cheap, as is the binding, which consisted solely of glue. The ink smudges, the pages fall out, and the cover cracks and separate from the binding a lot more quickly.

When I was working in the retail book business, the publishers didn’t even want the full book back for unsold mass markets. We just tore off the front covers and sent those back; the rest of the books got packed up in boxes and tossed in the dumpster. That’s why the ISBN barcode is on the inside of the front cover on mass markets, and there is always some boilerplate on the publisher information about how if you bought the book without a cover, it has been sold illegally.

So I guess I have mixed feelings about the news that they are going away. Then again, I tend to have mixed feelings about most things.

I ran across this Corona in a local junk shop today, so of course I had to get it.

It is a Corona 3 Folding Typewriter. I have not had a chance to find the serial number, but I’m guessing it’s from somewhere in the 1917-1920 range.

The typewriter is in kind of rough shape, but I’m in the market for machines to practice my cleaning skills and figuring out basic repairs. The most obvious problem—aside from lots grime, dings, and scratches, is that the draw band is broken. Aside from that, though, most of the action seems to work, although the space bar seems a bit dodgy.

 🔗 Alice McFlurry via Mastodon:

Whenever I go to museums, I like to pause in front of stuff that definitely isn’t art and talk about the “art” and how it makes me feel just to make the other people think they’re missing something.

Many years ago, I was at the Detroit Institute Of Art. Several curators where gathered around a roped off corner of a galley. In quiet but seemingly heated conversation, they were furrowing their brows and stroking their chins while at one of the art installations in the gallery.

The installation in question consisted of many small pieced of crumpled white paper piled up in the corner of the stark white gallery. Eavesdropping a bit, I gathered that the topic of the museum staff’s discussion was one particular wad of paper that lay on the floor a bit away from the pile, but still within the rope line marking off the installation.

Was this piece of paper part of the work? Or was it a piece of detritus that some museum visitor had tossed on the floor as they passed by? Maybe it was vandalism, or maybe it wasn’t even deliberate, simply having fallen out of a pocket or purse. The staff had come to no conclusion by the time I moved on from the gallery; I am not sure how they even could… call up the artist I suppose?

My own feeling was that it doesn’t matter. I am not suggesting that we should be encouraging people to make their own additions to random works in museums, but it is not the selection and placement of a work in a museum that makes something “art”. Anything can be art.

🔗 Indiana Senate Republicans Reject Trump’s Redistricting Effort - The New York Times:

Republican members of the Indiana Senate bucked President Trump on Thursday and joined Democrats in voting down a new congressional map that would have positioned Republicans to sweep the state’s U.S. House seats.

The 19 to 31 vote was a highly public defeat for Mr. Trump, who has spent significant political capital pushing for redrawn maps in Republican-led states and who repeatedly threatened political consequences for Indiana Republicans who did not fall in line. The defiance of Mr. Trump comes as he faces other signs of rifts within his own party.

I have given my home state a lot of shit over the years and no doubt I will continue to do so for many years to come.

Nonetheless, I am impressed that this bunch stood up to Trump and his goons. I am even more impressed that they did so in the face of the increasingly ridiculous corrupt campaign of extortion that the regime was waging against the state.

And yeah, I’m sure a bunch of these guys voted as they did because they smell the flopsweat and sense the blood in the water around Trump. Are they standing up on principle, or are they jockeying for position, starting to try to distance themselves from a loser? I don’t know the answer to that question, and I mostly think it does not matter.

I can already hear the Very Online crowd spinning up on Bluesky to lecture us about how Indiana Republicans are no heroes and how they are all still voting for all sorts of reactionary, bigoted garbage. I’m sure they are, but that is a different fight. We don’t have to all agree on everything, and a bad vote on one issue doesn’t necessarily subtract from a good vote on some other issue.

Like it or not, we are going to need a pretty broad coalition to pry Trump and his cast of bootlickers and crooks out of power. If it takes getting a bunch of otherwise objectionable legislators from Indiana on board, I’m prett okay with that.

Multiple times this week, I have been bundling up to head out into the cold but have been unable to find my gloves. After a few minutes of digging through the basket of hats, gloves, mittens, and scarves by the back door, I give up and put on my hat. 

Wondering why my hat does not fit properly, I take it off, only to discover that the gloves I had been looking for are inside it. 

It is at that point that I remember that I had started putting my gloves in my hat so that they will be easier to find in the basket of hats, gloves, mittens, and scarves by the back door.

How is your week going?