I had no idea this SNL sketch was a reference to The O.C.

Here’s a wild TIL. Back in April 2007 (god we are old), SNL aired this sketch Digital Short The Shooter (or Dear Sister). It was super weird. It’s got Bill Hader writing a letter to his sister, and then while “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap plays, we go to slow motion while Andy Samberg shoots him, everybody gets shot, there’s some cops (also shot). I remember Jack Burden really liking it, and I remember being mystified. What I didn’t know (and I don’t know if Jack Burden knew) is that it’s a parody of an infamous...

Continue reading...

Towards a smarter home, part 2: The mistake

smart home mockup

Well, oops. I was going to spend my second post in this series detailing my experience setting up the server, installing applications, and getting Home Assistant running. Instead, though, a pretty big oversight means I will have to wait a bit. I bought a refurbished Dell machine, which seemed plenty enough for what I wanted to do with it: 8th generation i5 Intel processor, 16GB RAM, and 1T storage. Except, oops, I didn’t notice that it included the stupid Intel Optane chip and the real storage is a spinny rust hard drive. Probably showing how long since...

Continue reading...

I can’t really write a good MLK post

Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial (NHQ202501050003)

I don’t really have the blogger credibility or the correct writing faculty to write a good post about Martin Luther King, Jr. Especially in light of the current climate: a bigoted idiotic wannabe dictator as president, the invasion of American cities by his fascist racist goons, everything that is going on. To be perfectly clear, King is as relevant now as he ever was, maybe even more so given events. But I understand my limits as a writer: that when I broach certain topics I veer wildly towards the way too overwrought. I cover a lack of...

Continue reading...

Towards a smarter home, part 1: Intro

smart home mockup

Gadgets and tech used to be fun and cool. In the far-too-distant past, products would be released that could do something tech couldn’t do before, or faster, or were just neat. Commodore 64s and Nintendo Entertainment Systems gave way to Sega Genesises, which gave way to PlayStation’s, which gave way to supercomputers in our pockets that could surf the internet and play all our music. But somewhere along the way, tech became a nightmare. To use a product, you had to sell your data to the advertising company. The web, which was fucking awesome in the 1990s,...

Continue reading...

The everything app

blue bird perched on a branch in nature

Don’t look now (seriously don’t), but X and its cousin Grok have a CSAM (child sexual abuse material) problem. And nobody is doing anything about it because nobody cares. And it has been coming (and happening) for awhile. Hell, Grok has been gross since at least last August. It’s been going on for weeks (since at least January 2, probably earlier)! Thousands of users are asking Grok to make them pictures of all sorts of women and girls in all kinds of variations of disgusting. I’d like to think that if any application or service introduced a...

Continue reading...

January 6

Five years ago, the President of the United States instigated a violent insurrection with the aim of retaining power despite losing the presidential election. Somehow, no action was taken about this, and he is once again the President of the United States. January 6, 2021, is a date that should live in infamy, but sadly probably will not. Because everybody just moved on, forgot about it, and lived like it had never happened. Nearly an entire political party, deeply and unhealthily under the thumb of that president, pretended as if it was just a minor incident, no...

Continue reading...

Questions

Screenshot of the Office, Kelly saying (without text) "Yeah, I have a lot of questions. First of all: How dare you?"

What the fuck? No, seriously. What the fuck. Did Donald Trump actually order an assault on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its leader? Is this a dream? Are we dead and this is hell? Did he really fucking say that the U.S. would run Venezuela now? Forty people may have died in the assault? Did he order and manage the assault and kidnapping from fucking Mar-A-Lago? Not the White House? Did they do it while on camera and reading fucking Twitter? What did Grok have to say about it? That it was a great idea or that...

Continue reading...