[tech] Calm Down—Your Phone Isn’t Listening to Your Conversations. It’s Just Tracking Everything You Type, Every App You Use, Every Website You Visit, and Everywhere You Go in the Physical World … ‘The hysterical tinfoil-hat crowd urges you to turn off your phone whenever you’re going to discuss something private—like your political opinions, religious beliefs, or medical conditions—as if the phone is somehow going to “hear” them and tech companies will use that info against you. In reality, they already know all those things because they know what news sources you read, the contents of your emails, what WebMD pages you’ve visited, and how long you’ve spent at which church, synagogue, mosque, or ethical humanist center. So don’t even worry about it.’
[life] Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project … I always find something useful in these lists of advice and lifehacks. YMMV. ‘Open your mail over the recycling bin.’
[comics] The John Wagner and Alan Grant Interview … A Comics Journal interview from 1988…. ‘GRANT: I didn’t think at the time that the “Apocalypse War” story worked all that well, but having read it in album form, I think it’s a really good story and that Carlos [Ezquerra]’s art-work suited it down to the ground. We were given him for that story as they wanted to use one artist all the way through it. They’ve got constant art problems on 2000 AD finding people who can keep up the output that they’ve got to have.’
[microsoft] You Suck at Excel … If you use Excel take a look at this video from Joel Splosky. It has some great tips and demos of powerful, under-used features.
[chris] Misspelled Acomb sign proclaims 'Chris is Risen' … ‘A church was presented with signs reading “Chris is risen” after a mix up at the printers. Acomb Parish Church, in York, had ordered four banners saying ‘Christ is Risen’ but the ‘T’ was missed off the finished article.’
[net] Digital hygiene … A post from Andrej Karpathy offering tips on cleaning up and securing your digital life. ‘The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.’
[netflix] Netflix Codes … Comprehensive list to find categories and genres on Netflix. ‘Why? You probably know that Netflix is using a really strange system to categorize it’s films and tv shows. Indeed, there isn’t any categories tab… We have the solution, with this site, you will be able to find categories by a little code.’
[tv] Looking for Lise … Dirty Feed investigates whether Lise Mayer, co-writer of “The Young Ones,” made any on-screen appearances in the show. ‘The thing which amuses me about this: everyone really wants Lise Mayer to have had an on-screen role in The Young Ones. Because it would tie a nice little bow on proceedings. Everyone else who wrote the show had an appearance, why not Lise?’
[maga] Musk Announces All 340 Million Americans Must Strip And Take Turn Pushing The Wheel Of Pain … ‘Of course, not everyone is going to like the fact that they will be expected to push nonstop without food or water until they collapse from exhaustion and are crushed under the wheel. But the point of this is not to make everybody happy. It’s about making the tough decisions and sticking to them. Say what you will, but ultimately we’re all going to have to submit to the terrible Ring of Blood whose cleansing agony none may escape.’
[space] Neither Elon Musk Nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars … Great article arguing why colonizing Mars is impossible. ‘Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?’
[movies] Baby, The Rain Must Fall (The New Yorker) (Archive Link) … Pauline Kael’s 1982 Review of Blade Runner. ‘“Blade Runner” is a suspenseless thriller; it appears to be a victim of its own imaginative use of hardware and miniatures and mattes. At some point, Scott and the others must have decided that the story was unimportant; maybe the booming, lewd and sultry score by Chariots-for-Hire Vangelis that seems to come out of the smoke convinced them that the audience would be moved even if vital parts of the story were trimmed.’
[life] What are your beliefs about the nature of reality? … Analyse your beliefs with this quiz. ‘Inflationary Multiverse — You accept the cosmological model where our universe is one bubble in an eternally inflating space, with other universe “bubbles” having potentially different physical laws, constants, and dimensions.’
