Today's phone-based video game:

1: Get election SMS spam
2: Block caller
3: Reply STOP
4: Get "you have been unsubscribed" from a different phone number
5: Goto 2, in an attempt to preemptively block their entire network.

My score was around 200 before I gave up.

Previously, previously, previously.

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

The ex-CEO of a company that sells carbon offsets has been charged with fraud for systematically exaggeration how much greenhouse emissions a project would avoid.

The idea of emissions offsets is full of loopholes. Most of the exaggeration is a matter of making high estimates; since there are no facts to compare with, it can't quite be called "fraud". But it does undermine the intended result.

A museum in Britain that is supposed to be about science will present "stories" about the "afterlife" of dead animals on display.

The "stories" are constructed by bullshit generators,

and they teach religion and superstition under the rubric of science.

Coal mines and gas wells in Australia seem to be underestimating their rate of methane leaks by as much as a factor of two.

In China, there seems to be only one way to criticize the government which is not forbidden: by stock trading.

Walz stated support for eliminating the electoral college.

I am in favor of that, but what Harris and Walz most importantly need to call for is directing more of the nation's wealth generation to the non-rich, as it did in the 1950s.

The US government responds to right-wing irrational attacks by taking special care to give no cash aid to victims who don't have papers to prove citizenship.

What does it actually take to evacuate during a weather crisis? For many Americans, it is far beyond their means.

Relatives call on the Dutch government to rehabilitate the conscientious objectors who refused to fight against the independence of Indonesia.

How can people continue to live in fire-prone areas?

Non-rich Americans who want to stop the elite from impoverishing them see little to support in "centrist" Democrats. Meanwhile, the wrecker falsely claims to oppose the elites even as he appears on stage with them.

As average [wildlife] population falls reach 95% in some regions, experts call for urgent action but insist "nature can recover."*

According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different platform that was downloaded. At some point late that night I wandered off and wrote the first version of the page that loaded when you pressed the "What's Cool" button in the toolbar. (A couple days later, Jim Clark would go ballistic in a company-wide email because I had included a link to Bianca's Smut Shack.)

For those of you who are unaware of these finer details, 0.9 was the first release of the Netscape browser (which begat Firefox) available to the general public. This beta release was an unannounced surprise. Prior to this, everyone assumed that what we were doing was going to be a standard for-sale product where you sent off your $35 and then some time later got a disc in the mail with a license key. That we just said, "Here's our FTP site, come get it, go crazy" was, at the time, shocking to people.

These anniversaries keep piling up, so I don't really have a lot to add, but check my NSCP tag or the Previouslies for more, particularly the links in this one.

---

I'd still like to find a way to run a mid-90s vintage Unix version of the browser under emulation on an M1 Mac. I asked about that a while back but was never able to Make It Go.

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

I'm watching this mediocre cartoon and they characterize the Knights Templar as, "They began to worship a disembodied head called Baphomet", and my inner Well Actually goes, "No, they invented banking and compound interest and had the muscle to collect, everybody knows that", and then I'm like... actually, that's fair, this dumb cartoon does not have it wrong. Please continue.

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

A Nebraska woman identifying herself as the "ambassador" for plaintiffs "God and His Son, Jesus Christ," is suing all homosexuals on Earth for breaking "religious and moral laws".

In the suit, entered into the docket as Driskell v. Homosexuals, Sylvia Ann Driskell, 66, of Auburn, Nebraska, asks in a seven-page, neatly handwritten petition that U.S. District Judge John M. Gerrard decide once and for all whether homosexuality is or isn't a sin.

The suit doesn't cite any case law under which a judge could make such a determination. In fact, it cites no court cases at all, quoting Webster's Dictionary and numerous Bible verses, instead, to bolster Driskell's central contention, which is:

"That homosexuality is a sin and that they the homosexuals know it is a sin to live a life of homosexuality. Why else would they have been hiding in the closet."

Driskell writes, "I'm sixty six years old, an [sic] I never thought that I would see the day in which our Great Nation or Our Great State of Nebraska would become so compliant to the complicity of some peoples [sic] lewd behavior."

Sadly, the link to the "neatly handwritten PDF" is 404.

Update: In all its handwritten glory.

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

Feedly is, generously, a CDN for RSS feeds. That's it. You had one job.

It allows the feed reader apps on my various devices to quickly download the new entries in all of my subscribed feeds from one place, without needing to hammer on each source individually (which is fraught.) It does this job adequately, if you never use its website as your actual feed reader.

But every time I see what their logged-out front page looks like -- which is always, since they are pathologically incapable of keeping me logged in -- I think, "I'm gonna have to stop using this pretty soon, aren't I?"

Yeah, see, I need (for light values of "need") an RSS CDN. I don't need "Threat Intelligence", "Market Intelligence", "AI Insights" or "AI Summary". These are in fact the opposite of what I need. But that someone from the "growth hacking" investor class has insisted on shoehorning this nonsense into the RSS CDN very strongly implies that they will be turning the blood-screws tighter and tighter.

Also, did I just see something scroll by in that crime-against-typography customer-testimonial ticker that said "netskape"? What fresh hell is this?

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

I thought it was "which dystopian 80s movie are you" but I guess it was about the election instead. It gave me this chart of "who's running on being the bigger cop."

Also, the SF Pissed Off Voter Guide is out.

Ranked Choice Voting Strategy:

For instance, entiiiiirely theoretically, say you don't love London Breed but detest Mark Farrell. You could vote for your favorites 1st and 2nd, then list Breed as a 3rd choice, leaving Farrell off your list entirely. This way, if it came down to a faceoff between Farrell and Breed, your vote would help keep him out of the mayor's office. Use ranked choice voting to vote your heart while making sure the worst candidate doesn't win.

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