Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@qoto.org

At the end of your journey you should be handed a tank containing your share of the CO2 produced by your flight, and you don't get to fly again until you can prove you made a plant eat it all.

The only thing worse than a trainspotter is one who insists on showing you his entire collection of potted trains.

Does anyone else feel like we're coming up on a rather different Singularity than the one that pundits of the last couple of decades were predicting?

Not a Singularity of asymptotic advancement, but a Singularity of our failings. A Singularity of Stupid.

(The font I chose is "Seravek". One way or another it seems to be available in Apple Books under MacOS Big Sur. It fits the prose and setting beautifully)

I'm reading the original serialized version of A E Van Vogt's "The Weapon Makers" for the first time. Very different from the version he published as a novel. Absolutely transporting. There's something about that 1940s-50s view of the far future that's indescribably captivating. I even switched to a rather blunt sans-serif font that gives it even more of a midcentury feel.

It's unfortunate that some countries need a bitter reminder of just how much you need the rest of the world. I don't know if Turkiye is prepared to reconsider its foot-dragging on NATO admission for Sweden, and of cousrse Sweden's too decent to couple the two.

And I wouldn't, for example, wish a natural disaster on Hungary either. It's just a pity that that seems to be what it takes for these sorts of regimes to remember, oh, yes, we need each other.

#Twitter. I don't usually, but if this doesn't seal it nothing does:

If I'm ever arrested, detained while traveling, or otherwise likely to have my phone taken away from me and accessed in ways I don't want, I should be able to disable face unlock immediately on my phone, and I may not have time to go through the menus to do it.

So as an experiment I said "Siri, disable face unlock." She said "I'm sorry, I can't do that."

Apple seriously needs to enable this.

Old news by now but I still can't understand why any Air Force officer on the ground or in the air would try to use a $400K heat-seeking missile on a balloon.

Balloons don't have hot jet exhausts. Even hot air balloons -- and this wasn't one -- are scarcely warmer than their surroundings.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/f16-missed-first-shot-lake-huron-ufo-1234679415/

People who justify Russia's invasion of Ukraine with "well NATO was expanding" are actually worse than the "well, what was she wearing?" crowd.

It's actually more akin to "what were other women wearing that day that set him off?"

If Microsoft really wanted to make itself useful they'd apply their AI research to Clippy:

"It looks like you're about to hit 'send' on something that will haunt you for the rest of your career. Would you like some help?"

Has anyone asked Cmdr. Straker if Skydiver even has the range to intercept a UFO over the middle of North America?

I can see why Russian soldiers are stealing windows from Ukraine. The windows in Russia seem to be remarkably bad at keeping people from falling through them.

Imagine what public transportation would be like if people were willing to pay what they really do for their cars for it. It'd run in a continuous stream and have the comfort and amenities of Air Singapore's First Class section.

As it is, people are quite astonishingly careful not to add up what their cars cost them in total, at all. It's the most ubiquitous example of wilful blindness in modern civilisation.

I'd just like to ask Musk's high-and-mighty critics what *their* solution is to the epidemic of toddlers in crosswalks.

Aw hell, now we'll never know what sex rapists are.

https://www.scottishdailyexpress.co.uk/news/politics/snps-controversial-gender-reforms-to-29234655

Thinking of the brilliant bombshell we just lost, here's something I stumbled on a month or so ago: a dance routine from a 1970 Raquel Welch TV special, remixed to a startlingly well-chosen piece of music: "Pets" by Porno for Pyros. The result works rather better than the somewhat trite choice it aired with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSOHO3GwEPg