Gamers Nexus: Discord’s Disturbing Ties to Global Surveillance ‒ ID Verification, Palantir, & Thiel [38min].

Captain Pikant BLUE MONDAY ‒ Analyzing the MOST BRUTAL BEAT of the 1980s ‒ Drum Patterns Explained [12min; via Jon].

About Here and HUB Cycling: The Bike Share Dilemma [18min].

Strong Towns: The sign you’re looking for is in Philly [1min].

Not Just Bikes: Why I don’t use Google Maps in Amsterdam [25min].

Technology Connections: You are being misled about renewable energy technology [1hr31min].

Shawn Grows: How Plantains Got Stolen [1min].

Fern: Did McKinsey Ruin Disneyland? [30min]. CW: Death, deplorable capitalism but I repeat myself, McKinsey, Disney.

Good Ol’ Freda trailer [2013; 2min]. Available on Kanopy for free with a US library card.

Shawn Grows: The Poisonous Spice [1min].

Hoog: The Hardest NASA Mission in History [35min].

I am E-Z to please, just get me a < $3 can of coffee for Christmas. That’s coming up, right? [LQQKS at calendar] “Huh.” Well, Arbor Day. Anyway, I was buying up fat stacks of some coffee ($1/can) from Grossout, not really knowing what it is. I just read the ingredients, took a ballpark guess at caffeine % (not listed, but lower than normal, turns out), went w/a can a day. Many cans later, finally looked on the bottom. MFG 2025 EXP 2026. Okay, so a company died or something. “Florence By Mills Coffee.” What in the Sam By Hill is that name. Main URL is tot. More research. Blah blah actor blah. Okay. More. Oh. It’s Eleven from Stranger Things, a show I’ve seen approximately seven minutes of many years ago. So. Stapling everything together, looks like this coffee jazz took a dive mid-2025, and they dumped the remaining cans on the secondary market. The fun reason I mention this is because there are five skabillion articles about the celebrity starting various businesses and zero articles about any of those things ending. Except now, you’re in the know. It’s a service I provide. I might be wrong. But if there’s no website for six months and Walmart is out of stock of every flavor ... going with dead. I still have some cans left. To the Ebaymobile!

PS If you haven’t explored the world of cheap thin-can coffee, don’t. I’ve gone through so many brands and 95% of them were not good (Japan’s BOSS Coffee is good; this ends the list of current good thin coffee brands I’m aware of that is not owned by some rat-fuck megacorp). Florence By Mills Coffee was good, but now it’s gone and I will savor the remaining cans like this: [FX: savors]. Though wasteful Florence By Mill Coffee “pods” apparently still exist along with a $149 Florence By Mills coffee machine thing. Maybe.

Drew’s Campfire: The Hidden Order in Chaos ‒ 4,000,000 Double Pendulums [26min]. (via jon)

One of my new year’s resolutions is to block even more useless/annoying sites at the hosts level. One particular site already makes my skin crawl with all of their haughty users “answering” questions by openly insulting people/rejecting the question outright/answering completely incorrectly (this is nothing new, I think it was the CEO who acknowledged some of this years ago) ... there’s this jackass sidebar of unrelated slop for every post. This was half of the garbage on a test query “duh global variables function python duh.” B L O C K E D

I like chewy info-dense websites but this can get stuffed in a bin.

The Birth of the Internet, according to Jon Bois [50min]. Part one of a four-part series. This is a must watch. Even if you have, like myself, “extreme negative interest” in the television franchise shown in the thumbnail. It is not about that at all. The subject is what the title is (see earlier in this paragraph, enclosed).

Top Ten of 2025, no particular order.

- social media pause to stop onslaught of Horseshit Days™
- ebike
- dogs
- cats
- throwing things out
- licorice
- cinnamon coffee cake muffins
- sleep
- throwing more things out
- replacing someone else’s garbage code with my own garbage code

i am using nicegui to make the beginning of a front-end for my little feed program

it’s terrible and aggravating and overly-poorly documented and somehow the problems i’m having with it over and over are not explained anywhere ever as if i’ve gone batty

like two of the problems first no error messages and second you update the code and you run it and it’s running older code

two great things that will drive you up a tree very quickly

i don’t like coding anymore

did i ever like it

i don’t remember, i can’t remember what i had for lunch yesterday

what am i

but i’m more productive with coding than with writing

writing non-fiction historical stuffs sometimes you actually move the needle forward by removing two sentences in a day

i have a few projects that have been going on for decades

the programming ones, some i use every day

the writing ones, they’re never done and just sit around like someone without bones, just a big useless blob

then i look at for example singer-songwriters who chirp about writing some massive hit in an afternoon during errands

and i think well i chose poorly

also what is the stuff on ant feet

they’ll show up to drink up the last drop of whatever liquid you’ve left in a mug

twenty nine of them

and you’ll shake the mug and wash it off and blow on it

and there will be seventeen left and some of them are yelling “do you mind, mate, i’m having a slurpy-slurp here” etc

i say we extract this feety material and implement it in some technological fashion

what a boon for science and humankind

you’re welcome

Megalag: Exposing Honey’s Evil Business Model [52min].

One (1) free Mr. Beast rictus with purchase

i am sorry

i should blur it out

it’s upsetting my plants

Trying Japan’s “Unfriendly” Restaurants [1min].

Arc Raiders: May your strings echo through the Rust Belt. [20sec]

Achievement unlocked: guitar. That one-song recorder thing needed a lift. I would just play a few notes, walk a bit, play a few notes. There’s a sort of unwritten rule not to dome recorder players, not that that’s followed 100%. “We’re putting the band back together”

So far I only have two nicknames for the ro-bots. Mr. French for the crawly thing that shoots five bajillion machine gun rounds BRRRRRTTTTT, and Sky Asshole for the fella you just saw in the video. It’s subtle.