The UK will require people eating in restaurants to identify themselves.

New Zealand's previous system, recording info about customers on paper, respected anonymity. It made the information available to collect when contact tracing needed it, but avoided creating a tracking database that the state could use for unjust purposes.

I am alarmed to read that New Zealand now requires customers to scan a QR code — with a Stalin's Dream device, evidently. That is not safe. And what about the people who don't have a portable phone?

We need to cover immigrants' medical bills and unemployment, or they won't get tested for Covid-19 and they won't be able to stay home if sick.

One supporter is persistently deleting everything from Kamala Harris's Wikipedia page showing her hash approach towards small-time street crime as well as her lax approach towards the theft of billions.

*Mining on Indigenous Territories [in Amazonia] Brings Ecological Devastation, Land Invasions, and Renewed Cycles of Violence.*

Progressives are trying to reclaim the term "populist", which around 1900 referred to a campaign to strengthen democracy and reduce economic inequality.

The rational, scientific approach to reopening the economy carefully and slowly.

Somerville, Mass, has given limited legal recognition to groups of any number of people that declare themselves to constitute a family.

Tim Bray recommends how to split up Google, taking account solely business questions and competition.

He doesn't address the issues of making users run nonfree software, and making them get accounts and identify themselves, which are the main reason I don't use Google services. But even in regard to competition, we need to go further. Gmail is too big; it should be split into several companies that compete.

The UK wants to send a girl back to Sudan where she would suffer female genital mutilation.

To evade legal obligations, the government will pretend to send her to Bahrain, never mind that Bahrain would not let her stay there and would send her to Sudan.

US citizens: call on elected officials to reject support from thug unions.

Order them on our merch page!

My apologies to those of you who had been waiting for your mask orders. Those went out yesterday and today.

The mask vendor I had been using is, it turns out, terrible, slow, and best of all, unresponsive. I've found a new vendor who is none of those things and is also local, and that's who we'll be using in the future, once this batch runs out. (Actually a few of you got the "new style" masks with your order already, because those arrived first even though I ordered them much later!)

Now that we're caught up, I'm going to do some different styles of masks, too: one with a dazzle pattern, one with the "DNA Lounge COVID-19 biohazard" logo, and a Turbo Drive logo. Any other suggestions you'd be interested in purchasing?

I haven't needed to do this in years, but now I find myself in possession of a couple of commercial, protected, region 1 NTSC DVDs. Handbrake 1.3.3 takes forever to read the indexes and then writes MP4 files with glitchy audio and no video at all. I've installed libdvdcss 1.4.2 into /opt/local/lib and /usr/local/lib, but I don't know whether Handbrake actually sees that. Since this is macOS 10.14.6, /usr/lib is unwritable.

What's the done thing?

Previously.

Painted masks are on all sides. Sad face, surprised face, crying-laughing face, smirking-demon face -- but the eyes are black beads, and lifeless.

Online discourse is obsessed with emotion and subjectivity, the tiny precise gradients of affect. Endless essays on anger (ours: valid, justified, full of moral urgency) (theirs: invalid, brutal, festering with hatred), shock, outrage, upset, trauma, and hurt. It's a very impressive show, but it's a distraction, a piece of performance art. The real function is to frantically cover up the fact that most of the time, most of us feel nothing at all. Screens burn holes through our brains and shrivel our genitals. You sit alone in a room. You look for things to upset you.

The person who types "lol" is never actually laughing; the person who types I'M SCREAMING is silently dabbing at a screen. In the same way, the person who is perpetually shocked and outraged and brimming with righteous fury is almost always lying to themselves. They're as affectless as the rest of us: play-acting, downloading synthetic emotions, and then passing them on.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

During this interminable lockdown, we've been doing a lot of repairs and improvements inside the club. Maybe someday we'll be allowed to let you back inside and show it to you.

Anyway, we were thinking that now is a good time to have someone paint some murals to liven up some of our blank walls. We've got a number of good spots for it: the walls on the balcony, next to and across from coat check; the lounge wall behind the DJ booth; the wall under the stairs where the satellite bar used to be; the green room; the restrooms; the pizza hallway; and maybe others I haven't thought of. We don't have anything very specific in mind, but we do have a lot of blank space.

Do you paint big murals? Let's talk. This is a paying gig.

Because of course there are.

Many of the show's adult fans genuinely enjoy My Little Pony and the wholesome escapism it provides. Others, however, delight in the irony of their fandom. To them, it's edgy and provocative to be an adult obsessed with cartoon ponies. That's where the Nazis come in. [...]

In supposed deference to principles of free speech and openness on the internet, the presence of self-described Nazis within a fandom that idolizes compassion-oriented cartoon characters has become a coolly accepted fact. The community has sorted itself largely into two camps: those who think anything goes as long as someone finds it funny, and those who would rather ignore toxic elements than admit that not everything is perfect. [...]

Around the same time, a blog called My Nationalist Pony started attracting a readership. Its author, who was known only as Buttercup Dew, wrote at length about My Little Pony as a subculture -- "as implicitly white as NASCAR, country music, and the Republican Party" -- that could be used to spread white-nationalist ideas. The show became an alt-right in-joke, and stayed that way, spreading, for a time, to the little-known white-nationalist spaces on Tumblr as well. [...]

What's clearest from talking with those on either side of the argument is that the My Little Pony fandom has developed a totally nonsensical hodgepodge of values. Many fans who specifically support Black Lives Matter, for example, are also fans of Aryanne, a fan-invented Nazi pony with a pink swastika on her hip. They do not acknowledge a contradiction. "I love Aryanne," a 25-year-old My Little Pony fan named Sam told me. "It's just cute, funny, sexy art." Then he added, "Black Lives Matter art is great. I welcome it." [...]

This idea of what counts as political and what doesn't is another thing the fandom took from 4chan -- where racial slurs are just jokes but anti-racism makes you a "social justice warrior."

Previously, previously, previously, previously.