I’m just getting around to watching this speech from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Impressive!
I really never paid much attention to Schwarzenegger’s time as governor of California, but because I was in living in Wisconsin during part of former pro wrestler Jesse Ventura’s time as governor of Minnesota, I guess I expected bluster and bravado. Yes, waving the Conan sword certainly provided manly spectacle for the groundlings, but the…
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reducing print edition to 2 days a week; cites plan to go all digital
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is scaling back its print edition to two days a week as part of the 235-year-old newspaper’s transition to an all-digital news operation, documents show. The plan is to eliminate its Friday print edition beginning Feb. 27, according to a letter from Post-Gazette’s human resources manager provided by the newsroom’s employee union.…
How journalists can prep for a possible violent event
Journalists face a unique threat when covering events, especially the upcoming inauguration where there have been posts on message boards saying reporters are soft targets and free game. The aim of this guide is to give a few broad tips on how to react and survive in a situation that could result in a mass…
Should you trust media bias charts? – Poynter
Traditional journalism values a focus on news reporting that is fair and impartial, guided by principles like truth, verification and accuracy. But those standards are not observed across the board in the “news” content that people consume. Tim Groeling, a communications professor at the University of California Los Angeles, said some consumers take too much…
Night Terrors (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 17) Trapped crew grows paranoid
Rewatching ST:TNG After discovering that the crew on a missing science vessel has met grisly deaths, the Enterprise crew gets stuck in a Space Thing of the Week, and everyone starts getting unusually irritable. Meanwhile, Troi has recurring nightmares about being suspended in a flying harness. On my rewatch it seemed contrived that the Space…
A question I find myself thinking all the time.
MAGA World Is Splintering: Following the riot at the Capitol, Trump supporters are having an existential crisis on Twitter.
Bryson Gray, a 29-year-old rapper and Donald Trump superfan from North Carolina, wants to make one thing clear: It was a group of the president’s most loyal supporters that rioted in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, and nobody else. When I spoke with Gray yesterday, he said he had been “too late” to get…
Apple threatens to remove Parler social networking service from App Store
Apple Inc has threatened to remove the Parler social networking service from its App Store unless the company changes its content moderation policies, Parler Chief Executive John Matze told Reuters on Friday. Parler is a social network where many supporters of President Donald Trump have migrated after being banned from services such as Twitter Inc.…
Twitter suspends Trump’s account
Twitter suspended Donald Trump’s account on the site Friday evening in the latest escalation by social media companies against a president they accuse of spreading misinformation and inciting violence. —Yahoo! News
Look at how many times this false claim of media conspiracy is being shared. Compare that to how much attention my fact-check is getting.
What if the DC rioters had been Black? I think we know the answer | Aja Hannah
This is not just an issue of a double standard between BLM protesters and white, Republican rioters. It is an issue of safety and justice. Black people asking for accountability when police are violent were met with violence from police. White people attempting to stop an election by force is met with sympathy and seemingly…
Robot wars: 100 years on, it’s time to reboot Karel Čapek’s RUR
I was honored to play Alquist in Artistic Prosperity’s virtual production of RUR over the summer. I’m glad to see Čapek’s play is getting some attention in the Guardian. Not many plays introduce a new word to the language. One that did was Karel Čapek’s RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots that had its premiere in Prague…
Fact Check: No, an NPR story on the Trump supporters’ attempted coup dated January 6, 2021 9:33 AM ET is not a sign of a conspiracy theory
According to the Internet Archive, this is a story NPR posted at 9:33 this morning. As events developed, and the story changed, NPR updated this page — drastically. As you can see, the headline and the picture are different; though the date the page was first created is still there, the page now also includes…
Twitter has blocked President Trump’s account, citing policy violations.
Playing with depth of field (blurring details that are closer than and farther from the focal point). #Blender3D #Steampunk
Fact check: You can safely ignore that “HOW TO FIGHT COVID AT HOME” meme
I noticed this meme a few days ago. I recognized the “friend of a friend who has insider knowledge” formula that makes people want to share a memes. I know better than to trust anonymous online sources that claim to have special knowledge, so I just re-read what the CDC says and moved on. Here…
The Unbearable Weakness of Trump’s Minions
Note that the URL of this story indicates it was initially published under the title “Cowards Are Destroying the GOP.” Opinion stories that take a clear stand are a valuable part of legitimate news coverage, though of course they need to be well sourced, and a good editor will seek a balance that reflects a…
More #Blender3D practice. Additional details for a steampunk control panel. Just because.
Galaxy’s Child (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 16) LaForge meets the engineer of his dreams
Rewatching ST:TNG LaForge is surprised when he learns the starship designer he had previously become infatuated with via the holodeck (s3e6 “Booby Trap”) is nothing like the romantic possibility he expected. (I turned the episode off during the cringeworthy dinner scene, and didn’t come back to it for almost a week.) The story unfolds like…