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It’s been gloomy all day – the kind of August day that’s hot, humid and still, sapping all your energy because nothing *actually* cools you off except real air conditioning (or standing in front of the refrigerator), not even taking a cold shower in the afternoon. At least the nights are still cooling off, even if the days are muggy.

Close to sunset, the clouds finally started to break up, and I began to think I might get to see tonight’s lunar eclipse after all.

Darkening sky with a bunch of small clouds, lit from behind/below.

That’s looking west. The clouds to the east were still a bit more solid, but low to the horizon, and by the time the moon cleared the rooftops and the eclipse was well underway, the clouds had broken up enough to see!

At first glance it looks like a half-moon...but the line between light and shadow is curved the wrong way, its endpoints aren't aligned with the center, and there's none of the texture you'd see along it in a normal moon phase

I took the sunset clouds shot with my Fairphone, which did a lot better than I expected, though I only managed to get misshapen blobs when shooting the moon. It’s been hectic enough that I didn’t try to set up the good camera. The point-and-shoot Canon with real optics does okay with the moon, as you can see here. (The teen’s iPhone, however, was able to get at least a couple of shots where the maria are visible. Not as good as the Canon, but better than any of my phones have managed.)

We went back inside, waited a while, went back outside, took some more photos, talked with the neighbors who were also looking at the moon, went back inside, rinse, repeat. Lunar eclipses are a lot more accessible than solar ones. They’re slower, since the Earth’s shadow is around 3 times the size of the moon at that distance. They’re visible from anywhere with a view of the moon, not just a narrow track. You don’t need eye protection. And unlike solar eclipses, a partial lunar eclipse is almost as cool as a total one. A lot of the time you can just walk out into your front yard.

The moon hangs in the black sky above the top of a telephone pole, one wire (and something hanging from it) passing in front of it. Most of the moon is a dim red color, on which the maria are clearly visible. A bright white arc at the top looks like a shallow beanie. The brightness completely washes out any details, and makes the outer edge of the arc bulge outside of the circle.

If you’re reading this close to when I’m posting it, the eclipse isn’t over yet. There’s still an hour or so before the moon completely passes out of Earth’s shadow. If you have clear skies and the moon is up where you are, go take a look!

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Over the last few years, right-wingers have finally started to realize that what they’re missing is empathy. Several decades’ worth of “I didn’t realize how bad this policy was until it hurt someone I know personally!” statements had already made that clear to the rest of us. “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!” as a meme goes back a decade now. But instead of realizing they should develop some, they’ve decided empathy must be bad, much like they previously decided that being aware of systematic injustice must be bad, and turned “woke” into a pejorative.

*sigh*

No, “Western Civilization” is not doomed by “suicidal empathy.” That people like Musk and Saal think “not treating people like garbage just because they aren’t like you” is an existential threat does not make it so. As Myers says, that tells you more about them than it does about society.

And if some aspects of our culture are threatened by empathy, such as the belief that certain types of people deserve to dominate others and other types of people deserve to be abused, then we should throw out those aspects, not cling to them even harder.

There are people who exploit vulnerabilities in society. But those people act a lot more like Elon Musk and a lot less like some random non-gender-conforming person who’s just trying to use the bathroom without getting beaten by a mob for picking the “wrong” one.

If our civilization is destroying itself, it’s not the people asking for empathy and inclusion who are doing it. It’s the reactionaries who insist on “taking back” their ability to treat others like garbage without consequence. They’re the ones tearing us apart.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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Back in the 1980s or early 1990s, I remember a motel that dropped out of the “Comfort Inn” chain. They reused existing signage by picking the name “Com-on Inn,” so they only had to replace a couple of letters. Something made me think of it recently, so I went looking to see if it was still around, or if I could at least find where it was.

DuckDuckGo didn’t find anything with the name (though when I did an image search, the broader criteria came up with a number of Comfort Inn locations). The closest Google suggested was a “C’mon Inn” in Grand Forks. I knew the general area it had to be in, so I went looking on Google Street View for something that looked right.

And I found it! A few blocks from where I thought it ought to be, and the building looked slightly different than I expected. But it’s in Monterey Park, next to a 7-11 (which jogged a memory), and the 2007 street view image is just barely legible enough to prove that even if I remembered the wrong location, I was right to remember that it actually existed!

Backlit view of a three-level hotel building with a pass-through driveway. Above the driveway you can barely see a circle and the letters "COM-ON INN" in roughly the same style as the old Comfort Inn logo.

Between 2007 and 2012 it appears to have been rebranded as the Floral Inn, and sometime after 2017 it became a Motel 6.

Now I’m trying to think of other signs that have been reused like this. I know I’ve seen others! But at the moment, all I’m coming up with are entirely new signs placed in a distinctive rounded-triangle housing. I’ve seen enough of those that I seriously considered making a “Used To Be a Winchell’s” Tumblr in the previous decade!

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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On the Blaugust Discord, UltrViolet suggested that bloggers link their post titles to the permalinks so that it’s easy to just right-click, “Copy Link as Markdown,” and get a formatted link with the correct title. (I’ve noticed Orion includes this in its context menu, and there are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that add it.)

I’ve been using the publication date in the post footer as the permalink on all the 11ty-generated parts of my site since I first converted the Les Mis blog back in 2021. But I can’t remember why I made that decision. I’m 99% certain every WordPress theme I’ve used has linked the title (even this one, which links from the timestamp too). It wasn’t an example in eleventy-base-blog either.

My best guess is that I was just implementing the Fediverse’s convention of linking the timestamp to the permalink. But that’s almost certainly because all the Twitterlike services don’t have titles.

But in looking up linking conventions, I went down an interesting rabbit hole about rel="bookmark".

Anyway, it’s an obvious change for better usability, and I’ll be updating my templates ASAP. (Edit: it’s done!)

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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Sure, I like electronic gadgets. But I dislike planned obsolescence more.

It’s one thing when the newer model really is that much better. “All About the Pentiums” exaggerated it, but computer hardware in the 1990s really was improving by leaps and bounds. (And the software was devouring those performance gains, both in demanding more resources, and being less efficient as programmers were told to optimize for their own time, not for disk space or RAM.) That eventually settled out around the time smartphones and cloud computing started taking off, which is why I was able to run a 2012 model CPU all the way through 2024. A faster PC would have been nice, but I didn’t need one yet.

As I recall the tech industry freaked out when demand for new PCs dropped. There was probably a rash of “Millennials are killing computers!” articles.

But smartphones were going through the same kind of rapid improvement. You could easily justify buying a new phone after only two years: it was a lot faster, had a better display, had a better camera and more storage, and so on. And the carriers were happy to hand you a “free” new device to keep you on their service. Heck, if you really wanted (and could afford) to buy a new phone every year, you could make a case for it.

In that environment, you could kind of accept a company only offering 2-3 years of support for their phones.

Eventually that settled out too, and it takes longer for new phones to really be worth the upgrade. Of course the industry has tried to keep the pace going. If the hardware still works, and it’s still able to run the apps people want to use, there’s no good reason for the company to stop supporting it after only three. Especially with something whose main purpose is to be constantly connected to the Internet.

I have an Android phone from 2020 and a tablet from 2019. The tablet still works fine. (It’s great for digital comics, or PDFs that are pre-formatted for 8.5×11″ pages.) The phone worked until two days ago. (Technically it still does, but I don’t want to overload the already-swollen battery.) But they’re both unsupported. Not because the hardware has failed (up until Monday). Not, like the Poke3, because they can’t handle today’s apps. Simply because Google and Samsung don’t want to provide updates anymore. Not even bugfixes. Not even security fixes.

It’s maddening.

Especially with prices on new electronics skyrocketing due to the AI datacenter-driven RAMpocalypse.

There are many things I dislike about Microsoft, but I appreciate that they finally realized that a large chunk of their customer base can’t or won’t upgrade their hardware just to install Windows 11, no matter how they try to convince us, and has extended Windows 10 support twice with minimal hoops to jump through.

The Fairphone 4 (2021) that I pressed into service to replace the dying Pixel 5 (2020) is more or less comparable in terms of speed. I still need to experiment with the camera. But it’s still supported through 2028, meaning it’s safer to use online. Which, again, is what cell phones are for.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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I had a migraine this morning that really threw me for a loop. Then I spent the afternoon and evening dealing with a different kind of headache: getting my phone number transferred to a new(ish) phone.

We picked up a Fairphone 4 a few years ago as sort of a hedge in case the electronics industry and/or tariffs and/or international trade went bonkers and one of our phones died. (We weren’t expecting all three.) The teenager used it for a bit before we bought him a phone that was closer to what he actually wanted to use. So the Fairphone returned to the back bench, so to speak.

A cell phone held in a hand, showing the California DMV website. A bright magenta line is running vertically down the entire screen, including the status bar at the top and the onscreen buttons at the bottom.Today, a bright vertical magenta line appeared on my Pixel 5’s screen. I’d noticed it was running hot lately, and when I pulled it out of the case, sure enough it had started bulging.

I know it’s old. I’ve been trying to get as much use out of it as I can, which, well, I guess I have.

(Edit: added photo)

I do not like spicy pillows, Sam I Am.

So I reset the Fairphone and started setting up the most important apps: authenticator, password manager, stuff like that. And I set about unlocking the SIM protection on my phone number and got ready to call customer service.

I knew from experience that the Fairphone 4 works fine on T-Mobile’s US network, but their apps don’t know how to activate the e-sim. So I was prepared to talk someone through.

But because we’d been swapping back and forth between phones, the sim was still registered as attached to the teen’s number, even though the number is actually pointing to his current phone. It took over two hours (at least 45 minutes of that on hold) and three levels of escalation to first figure out that’s what the problem was, and then find someone with the access to fix it.

They did finally get it all sorted out, but it was not the way I wanted to spend my afternoon.

(And when I let the old phone cool off, the screen went back to normal, though it’s still bulging.)

Edge-on view of the phone showing that the glass screen is splitting away from the plastic case.

And to top it off, Nextcloud’s photo uploading has stopped working reliably, so I have to go through the last couple months of photos and make sure I have everything copied over. I went through some of them tonight, and need to get the rest…soon.

For now, I’ve turned the old phone off completely overnight.

Once I’ve got the photos transferred, I should figure out whether it’s worth repurposing the device with a new battery or just running it without one. And then dispose of the fire hazard.

Blaugust 2026: My Posts

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I know, I’m already doing 100 Days To Offload. And I’m on track! I’ve written 24 posts in the last two months, so I’m actually ahead! But a few days ago I found out about Blaugust, a challenge to publish daily and/or write 31 posts in the month of August.

I can’t resist the wordplay in the name!

100 Days doesn’t have any set themes, and Blaugust’s themes are optional. And apparently it’s a fairly laid-back challenge, so if I miss a day I don’t need to drop out.

So what the heck: I’ll aim for 31 posts this month and see how far I get.

Besides, it’ll help motivate me to catch up on book reviews.

As with 100 Days, for Blaugust I intend to include any new or substantially rewritten page on my site, not just the ones that show up here in the reverse-chronological feed. The way I see it, what matters is less the specifics of what counts as a blog, and more that I’m writing new stuff on a regular basis and putting it out there on my own website, not on corporate social media.

Time to start my Blaugust post list:

  1. This post.
  2. Legends of Amberland (game review)
  3. First the Migraine, Then the Headache
  4. FairEmail (app review)
  5. Grumbling about Planned Obsolescence
  6. Where to Put Your Permalink
  7. What is rel="bookmark"?
  8. TIL about Hybrid MBR/GUID Partitions
  9. Starfleet vs. Jean Valjean?
  10. The Prestige
  11. Eulogy for the Pixel 5
  12. Canon Camera Connect
  13. To Each This World (book review)
  14. Reusing the Sign: Com-On-Inn
  15. The Confidence Game (Maria Konnikova) (book review)
  16. Regarding Empathy
  17. Lunar Eclipse vs. Summer Gloom