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Phillip Winn

In case anybody was worried after I posted on Wednesday about trying to assemble a brightly-colored jigsaw puzzle on a brightly-colored tablecloth, we did remove the tablecloth later that evening.

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Phillip Winn

I know, Black History Month is the most behind us now of the three times I’ve said so. That said, I posted a lot of YouTube playlist links last month, and it’s possible someone missed one. So here they are again, all together now:

Black History, by One Mic History
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFA
Unsung Black Heroes, from Quentin R. Jiles
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuX
Black History Music Playlist
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMG
Moments in Black History, from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD-
Black History for White People
youtube.com/@blackhistoryforwh
Black History Audiobooks
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnk
Crash Course: Black American History, with Clint Smith
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8d
Celebrating Black History Month At The Tiny Desk
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy2
Black History Matters, from the National Abolition Hall of Fame and Museum
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjV
Hidden Figures: Black History, from TED-Ed
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJi
Black History in Two Minutes or so
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsB
Black American History, by Extra Credits
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhy
Black History, from Untold History
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqq
The African Lofi Project
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL52
Celebrate Black History Month with Sesame Street
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8T
Black History Month, from Biography
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRl
Black History Year, by PushBlack
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2X
Eyes on the Prize, from PBS
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI1

That ought to keep anyone busy and entertained both.

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Phillip Winn

I know, Black History Month is even more behind us now than it was a few minutes ago. Still, I recommended a bunch of people to follow, and I’m not sure whether every post got the same amount of attention. Tomorrow is Friday as I type this, but my company is giving workers Friday and Month off as a “Wellness Weekend,” so today feels like Friday to me.

Here, then, is the complete list of recommended follows, each and every one of which will make your home timeline better (shuffled from the order in which I originally posted them):

@airadam Air Adam
@majorlinux Marcus Summers
@kyra_davis Kyra Davis
@BigAngBlack Ang Black
@DHS Darker Hue Studios
@carnage4life Dare Obasanjo
@KFuentesGeorge Prof Kemi FG
@liberate The Way of Accountability
@popcornreel Omar Moore
@daryl Daryl G. Wright
@Adam_Cadmon1 Adam F. Lawton
@midnightcommander@linuxrocks.online midnightcommander
@victoriomilian Victorio Milian
@Atmvn Atman
@Shells@mastodon.world Michele
@AshBeardguy Ashton
@JMadFour Jay Madison
@Deglassco D. Elisabeth Glassco
@dtgeek Anthony Dean
@mekkaokereke Mekka Okereke
@venitamathias Venita
@jamieBGN Jamie Broadnax
@NoraBurns Nora Burns
@Diva2022 Diva2022
@jentrification jenifer daniels
@eosfpodcast Rod Faulkner
@sonyasteele Sonya Steele
@VoiceM Voice M
@zhivi zhivi
@nadinestorying she who weaves stories
@TlanetteRoget BovaryCee
@stephen Stephen Anfield
@kingsley kingsley
@Maggie Maggie
@seanalan Sean Gonsalves
@nataliedavisgdread Natalie Davis
@Jaden2@mstdn.social Jaden
@Onemeatball One Meat Ball
@onlymeindc Sherri G., PhD
@BenCisco Ben Cisco
@DiasporaDiamond Diaspora Diamond
@funcrunch Pax Ahimsa Gethen
@hipcinema Nadine Patterson
@rosanita Rosanita
@black_intellect blk_intellect
@anxiousrage Abeni

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Phillip Winn

I know, Black History Month is behind us now. Still, I want to do just a little bit of housekeeping and follow-up. After all, I didn’t boost every single one of @mekkaokereke’s excellent threads, and I could have. So now, here they are, all in one place:

Feb 1: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 The Statue of Liberty
Feb 2: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Generational Wealth
Feb 3: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Racism Everywhere
Feb 4: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Swimming (and Drowning)
Feb 5: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Abraham Lincoln
Feb 6: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Veterans
Feb 7: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 “High Crime Neighborhoods”
Feb 8: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 U.S. National Anthem
Feb 9: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Education
Feb 10: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Driving
Feb 11: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Crime
Feb 12: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Early Adopters
Feb 13: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Cowboys
Feb 15: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 “Where Are You From?”
Feb 16: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Southern Strategy
Feb 17: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Black Panthers
Feb 18: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Anti-Asian Hate
Feb 19: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Black Music
Feb 20: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 OJ Acquitted
Feb 21: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Gender Pay Gap
Feb 23: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 BMI
Feb 25: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/109 Discovery and Inventions

That’s the lot of them, and every one worth a re-read.

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Phillip Winn

Dear Sunday pwinn, I appreciate that you decided to start a 2000-piece Ravensburger jigsaw puzzle as a way to take your mind off of Things™. But could you not have first removed the Christmas-themed tablecloth from the table? Signed, Mid-week pwinn

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Phillip Winn

It’s the end of Black History Month, but never the end of Black history. One way to think about why we spend only one month focused on Black history is that we spend one month looking back so we can spend the other eleven looking forward, always and forever keeping our eyes on the prize.

youtube.com/watch?v=8cVJmwSStL

That’s the legendary Mavis Staples, from 2007. It was also the theme of a PBS documentary.

Eyes on the Prize, from PBS
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI1

That playlist is a bit jumbled, but there are several excellent documentaries from public broadcasting there.

Fellow wypipo, Black people don’t disappear on March 1, and the challenges unique to Black people don’t either. We all face struggles, it’s the American variation on the human condition, but this country reserves some challenges for those with more melanin, and we shouldn’t forget that.

History doesn’t end. Tomorrow’s history is today’s news coverage, and the news isn’t great. Former cartoonists and current politicians are making openly-hostile statements against Black people and Black culture, preying on ignorance and lack of understanding, hoping an uncritical audience will take their statements solely at face value, ignoring the nudges and winks and high-pitched whistles. In some cases, they’re even saying the quiet parts out loud. They won’t stop tomorrow, and neither can we.

Black history is American history, and American history is Black history. Black lives matter. Recognize and celebrate Black excellence every day of the year.

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Phillip Winn

I’ve been critical of Siri in the past, but over the last few days I’ve had several interactions with Siri that impressed me.

While driving, I asked Siri who owns Fiat. I expected to be told it couldn’t display information while driving, but instead Siri audibly told me that according to Wikipedia, Fiat is owned by FCA. When I asked, with an eyeroll, who owns FCA, Siri further explained that it’s a joint European-American company, Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles.

Later I said something like, “Hey, Siri, give me directions to 13353, no, wait, I meant 13553…” It was a foolish act of faith that I even finished giving the address, rather than aborting the process, but It rewarded my faith when it responded by giving me directions to the corrected address.

I just checked Wikipedia, and apparently FCA has been absorbed into Stellantis, so Siri’s version of Wikipedia is slightly out of date. Still, Siri was tracking context enough to know that when I asked about FCA, I mean the one it had just told me about, not any one of the other dozens of things those initials could stand for.

More importantly, I’ve had negative experiences related to both of those use-cases in the past, so there have clearly been recent improvements to Siri’s language-parsing.

The remaining area in which I get the most hit-or-miss results is playing music. Sometimes I am very clear: “play the song with the lyrics ‘correct lyrics,”” for example. Sometimes I give incorrect lyrics, and it’s usually okay with that, too. But every now and again I’ll ask for a particular song or album and it will offer up something that suggests that Siri occasionally imbibes in recreational drugs to excess. Just bizarre responses, not at all what I asked for, presumably related by some tangential path via lyrics in songs I don’t know. I haven’t been asking Siri to play things for weeks now, after a particularly-frustrating exchange, but perhaps I should give it a shot.

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Phillip Winn

It’s a common joke, but also a bit frustrating that Black History Month is the shortest month of the year–by two days. The good news is that we are allowed to talk about Black history the rest of the year, too! In fact, given that Black history is American history, and given how much Black history is suppressed and rewritten and denied even today, let alone for the last 400 years, I think it’s worth sticking with the subject into March and beyond.

youtu.be/aYVZ5GMyzS4

Black History Year, by PushBlack
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2X

Instead of short videos, PushBlack delivers longer deep-dives into subjects for Black History Year, a 40-minute podcast. I’m linking YouTube, because that’s what I’ve been doing this month, but you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. The YouTube videos are chapterized, which is nice.

If 40 minutes is too long for you, PushBlack also delivers a short, byte-sized series of videos.

2 Minute Black History, by PushBlack
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2X

There are 68 and counting of the short videos. Of course, I recommend both.

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Phillip Winn

Apparently many people believe that if a person picks up a gun and points it at you and takes your stuff, that is theft, obviously, but if that same person picks up a government, and points law or policy at you and takes your stuff, that’s just how the world works. Nobody is to blame. Billionaires are totally normal. You had a choice between taking that job and dying in the street, so it was your choice as much as the billionaire’s that led to the status quo.

The Venn diagram of these people and those who believe that “taxation is theft” overlaps quite a bit.

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Phillip Winn

What better way to prepare for a week of work than to watch videos from Biography?

Black History Month, from Biography
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRl

There were 17 short videos in this list until I sat down to type up this text and post the list, and suddenly, less than an hour ago, there are 17 short videos and one long one. I guess it’s time for me to learn all about WWE Superstar wrestler Booket T!

Or everybody else. I might save that one for last, but that’s just me.

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Phillip Winn

None dare call it a regression, but I was once able to use /me in iMessage on MacOS and it would handle that as IRC servers do, turning it into a reference to myself in the third person.

/me misses that feature

would become, in italics, centered:

pwinn misses that feature

I’m not afraid of MacOS becoming “too iOS-like,” because I think Apple correctly recognizes the differences between them. But I am sad that when they standardized the code base between the two platforms, MacOS lost /me handling, rather than iOS gaining it.

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Phillip Winn

I miss Saturday morning cartoons. They might still be on, but on-demand video content means nothing is limited any more, so what would reason would a young person have to only watch cartoons on Saturday mornings? The world is better, but things I once valued are lost in the process.

I also miss Sesame Street, but I support that same trend in on-demand video content that I lament on Saturday mornings means I don’t actually have to rely solely on memories. I can, for example:

Celebrate Black History Month with Sesame Street
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8T

There are 73 videos in this list, some of them from 14 years ago! There are some beautiful moments in here, and just letting the playlist roll brings back some memories for an old guy like me.

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Phillip Winn

The best way to kick of a weekend of music during Black History Month? If you ask me, it’s hard to go wrong with more than 20 hours of African Lo-fi.

The African Lofi Project
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL52

Great all week long, great in the car, or in earbuds, this is just a great bunch of music.

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Phillip Winn

I’m going to have to double- or triple-up to get through the rest of my compiled links while people are still paying attention during Black History Month! Let’s carry on with another playlist of videos, this time 36 of them:

Black History, from Untold History
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqq

More two-minute videos, this time focusing on people who don’t come up as often, like Ethel Payne and Garrett Morgan, or somewhat better-known figures as Sojourner Truth and DJ Kool Herc.

You could spread these videos out over the weekend and be ready for more come Monday, or squeeze them all into a marathon 72 minutes or so. Either way, enjoy them!

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Phillip Winn

It’s Friday, Friday, got to get down on Friday, everybody–wait, no. I mean, yes, it’s Friday, but no, there’s no need to put that song back into your head.

Instead, let’s Follow more people! It’s time for a Fresh Flock of Five Fine Folks to Follow on Friday!

@VoiceM Voice M
@AshBeardguy Ashton
@DiasporaDiamond Diaspora Diamond
@BenCisco Ben Cisco
@victoriomilian Victorio Milian

In my head, Ben Cisco is a guy with that name in real life, but he leans into sharing the name with Ben Sisko, the fictional commander of Deep Space Nine in the Star Trek series of that name, and so sets his online persona accordingly. If that’s not the case, I don’t know want to know, because I love it. I hope he even looks a bit like Avery Brooks, but if not, again, I would rather not know.

We’re coming to the end of Black History Month soon, so here are a few more people I’ve been following recently. Even though it breaks the alliteration, I guess they are a Few Fine Folks more.

@Onemeatball One Meat Ball
@Adam_Cadmon1 Adam F. Lawton

Follow them all! The more, the merrier!

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Phillip Winn

Black history is American history, and American history is Black history. What better way to educate yourself than with Black American History? In this case, a series of videos from Extra Credits.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhy

17 videos about people like the Harlem Hellfighters and Billie Holiday, and events like Interstate Displacement and the Harlem Renaissance, all very good videos.

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Phillip Winn

The Butlerian Jihad used to be, for me, one of the most fantastical elements of the Dune series. Sure, melange enabling interstellar travel and giant worms, but a war fought to prevent anything like computers?

With the rise of generative AI models, I think I see it now. It isn’t that humans fight against the machines, it’s that humans fight against humans to prevent the use of the machines.

I now believe Dune to be among the most realistic science-fiction sagas ever written. It’s about a company strictly controlling a valuable resource that enables transportation, and being willing to do anything at all to preserve their monopoly.

The oil must flow.

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Phillip Winn

Someone On The Internet™ recently pushed back against the idea that the precursors to modern cops in the USA were either “slave patrols” (actually anti-slave patrols) in the south, or union-busters in the north. He had two objections. The first was that the oldest police force in the USA is from Boston, which revealed that he couldn’t even finish reading the “union-busting” part of the sentence, but was so triggered by the words “slave patrols” that he jumped ahead and starting typing his reply. The second was that there were cops in ancient Rome.

This objection does not support his position as well as one might think.

The ancient city of Rome did not, in fact, have a police force like we think of them today, but they did have the “vigiles urbani”, which had two functions: fighting fires and catching runaway slaves.

Yes, that’s right, not just the first cops in the USA, but the cops highlighted as predating them by thousands of years, were also anti-slave patrols. And firefighters.

Oh, and for anyone who thinks it is important that the cops who beat Tyre Nichols to death were themselves Black, the vigiles were themselves slaves under supervision, slaves who spent their time catching other slaves.

What they did not do was investigate crimes. US cops have clearance rates well below 50% for everything but murder, and barely above 50% for murder, but the vigiles were closer to 0% unless you count “trying to run away from being enslaved” as a crime.

If you wanted evidence, you had to gather it yourself. If you needed a witness, you had to grab them and drag them in front of a magistrate yourself, or hire someone to do so. Even the accused, you had to capture and present them to court as well. No wonder, then, that justice was largely available to the wealthy, but not the poor. The poor had to police themselves.

One last point about the vigiles: I’ve mentioned a couple of times that one of their two primary functions was fighting fires. So it’s notable that during the Great Fire of Rome, they spent their time looting rather than trying to fight the fire. Plus ça change, etc.

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Phillip Winn

It’s still Black History Month, and there is still so much to learn about our shared history, especially for wypipo like me who grew up missing out.

But hey, maybe you’re busy! February is a short month, but you’ve still got a month’s work to get done, so there’s no time. And yet somehow you’ve got two minutes to read this. Because while there’s never time to sit down and watch a two-hour movie, it’s easy to watch many very-short videos and find out that two hours have passed by. 😜 Good news!

Black History in Two Minutes or so
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsB

Don’t worry about the list having 86* videos on it, focus on the “two minutes or so” part! Whenever you have a couple of minutes, you can hit play, and if you stop two minutes later, fine. If you stop an hour later or run out of videos, also fine.

(* The list says 92, but [28] is a dupe, and five others are promotion for when the series was nominated for several awards [39, 40, 61, 62, 63])

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Phillip Winn

It’s Friday! It sure is.

For during , I’m recommending people I follow and find interesting. Today we’ve got filmmakers, marketers, and nerds, my favorite.

You Five Fantastic Friendly Friday Follow recommendations are:

@hipcinema Nadine Patterson
@NoraBurns Nora Burns
@majorlinux Marcus Summers
@jentrification jenifer daniels
@BigAngBlack Ang Black

Follow them all!

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