💻 The MacBook Air I'm posting this from is older than I'll admit in polite company, so I've been eyeing the new 15-inch Air, and today Amazon is selling the base configuration - in all colorways - at a $200 discount.

👍 Apropos of my earlier post about considering migration to a different Mastodon server: Notes from a Mastodon migration - Erin Kissane's small internet website

🚆 Right now I do ActivityPubs primarily from mastodon.social. But I’m researching migration and reading about other folks’ experiences. I love omg.lol as a whole and social.lol is where I probably belong, but it’s daunting to move. If you decided to migrate here from another server when social.lol launched, let me know if you have any tips or tricks for someone considering the move!

💬 So the Gummi Bears show from 1985-1991 was both something I think I saw in its entirety during its original run (I was born in 1983), and something I completely forgot had ever existed.

Avon-by-the-Sea Beach.

Author and actor Miranda Keeling posted this on Mastodon, where she frequently posts interesting fragments of conversation she overhears in everyday life:

Woman in a supermarket: Fake it til you can’t be bothered anymore, and then just be yourself.

This has been one of my core experiences of aging. A lot of faking/masking/figuring stuff out for the first 30 years, then the last ten years steadily moving toward where I am now: how could I possibly be bothered to be anything but myself?

I originally posted this to my Mastodon account.

I saw The Toaster Museum linked to over at Hacker News and immediately thought of John Siracusa (@siracusa).

Here’s some great context for why I immediately thought of him, by his friend and Accidental Tech Podcast (@atp.fm) co-host Casey Liss (@caseyliss).

Associated Humane Societies.

I have some more Bluesky invite codes.

But I’m 40 and married, so I don’t just hand a code to the first internet user that smiles at me.

Bluesky servers can use the invite tree in moderation decisions, so I do at least some vetting of folks before I send them a code. No hate/harassment/anti-vax etc.

Text shot from Bluesky’s F.A.Q. about their policy on using invite code trees in moderatiom efforts: Question: How does the Bluesky server use the invite tree? Answer: We reference the invite tree to track behavior on the social graph. For example, if we take action to moderate an account, we may revoke invite codes from other accounts in the same invite tree.

Top Gun: Maverick, 2022 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

This review may contain spoilers.

Sure, it’s a couple hours of Tom Cruise being paid millions of dollars to do stunts literally everyone else in the world would have to pay millions of dollars to do. But nails the fan service, the tech, and the physics.

And it’s fun.

Also, it includes an appearance by the Ice Man himself, though anyone who has seen Val Kilmer’s autobiographical documentary Val will instantly notice that Kilmer basically just walked onto the Maverick set dressed as he always dresses to greet company these days.

Threatening to take away your customers’ fake merit badges if they don’t pay more isn’t a business.

It’s barely a grift.

It’s how a lonely bully enforces the closest thing to social relationships he can possibly attain.

But at least we can call the post-mortem when this all explodes “the X-Files.”

Obviously this is incredible, full stop. But if you’re trained in the craft and the composers, this must be one of the most delightful things you’ve seen in a long, long time. And those animations!

youtu.be/WRfsibwR5…

The kicker? The performer, Joseph Castanyer Alonso, is the cellist of the Royal Stockholm Philaharmonic Orchestra. Piano isn’t even his primary instrument. Wild.

(Via kottke & Erikmitk)

🍿 Prey, 2022 - ★★★★ (contains spoilers)

This review may contain spoilers.

A Predator movie is only as good as its protagonist. 

The dialogue can mostly suck, as it does here. 

The CG effects can look like trash, as they too often do here. 

The plot can be an early colonial-American choose-your-own-adventure story, as it (mostly) is here. 
  
But if you have 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger, or 2022 Amber Midthunder, you will have a movie worth your time, and worthy of a theater run. 

That Prey didn't get the latter is an affront to Midthunder's performance. 

She carries the movie, together with the skilled eye of Philadelphia's own Dan Trachtenberg. 

And you can't help but notice, as the movie progresses toward a climax that thrills in spite of its predictability, that only she and the Predator get any character development. They're growing in parallel: she coming into her power, and it learning that its power may, for the first time, not be enough to ensure its survival.

(And yes, the dog lives.)

One bit of Casey Newton’s latest Platformer piece, on how Threads can survive the calm after the storm, must have many social media pros searching their feelings.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of social media managers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Casey Newton wrote in his newsletter Platformer about how Threads can survive its initial explosion in user base: "the best version of Threads is an app where people go to learn about and discuss what’s happening in the moment, news included, and absent that the feed is going to feel like one more overstuffed shopping mall for a company that already has plenty of those. (The earliest days of Threads, when the timeline was dominated by brands posting cringey engagement-bait, offer a good roadmap for what the company should avoid.)"&10;&10;https://www.platformer.news/p/five-reasons-threads-could-still

I need Mrs. Meyers to answer for the fact that her “Compassion Flower” handsoap scent has me routinely smelling like I think Axe body spray is a legitimate thing for a 40-year-old person to smell like.

A photo of Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day hand soap, Compassion Flower scent

Kaya’s Kitchen.

Avon-by-the-Sea Beach.

I was going to treat reddit like Facebook, visiting every 1 or 2 months to see what was going on. But reddit leadership are so hostile to the most engaged users that I think it’s time to delete my account, which sucks.

Reddit removes years of chat and message archives from users' accounts | Mashable

💬 💬 Okay, I'm trying again to see if I can set it up so my updates on status.lol are imported to my Micro.blog and syndicated out from there.

Elon Musk is the answer to the question:

What if we gave MRAs, incels and wannabe MAGA Big Deals™ billions of dollars and Peter Thiel’s cell phone number?