Automotif DCXXI...

Will I get up from my table and jog down the block to get a picture of a 1963 Buick Riviera idling at a traffic light?

Yes. Yes I will.

Photographed with a Canon EOS R and an RF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

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Sunday Meme Dump!

There must be more to it than that...

Old tech is making a gradual comeback, and for a variety of reasons...

I am not the only one thinking about the upsides of inconvenience, it seems; there is even a term, frictionmaxxing, to describe the trend of people resisting the lulling ease of screens. On a Saturday morning when I do not have to help a friend move, I am in bed scrolling Instagram. One video features what appears to be an elder millennial saying that he wants the nineties back. He wants a VCR. He wants old-school arcade machines that you have to feed with quarters. He wants a Walkman and cassette tapes to put in said Walkman.

When you're in front of the arcade game, you are playing that game, when listening to the Walkman, you're listening to that album. When you're reading a dead tree book, you're reading that book. When you're photographing with a camera instead of a cell phone, that's all you're doing: taking pictures.

There's no channel surfing on those devices. You're in the moment, committed to that choice. There's intentionality to it.

Plus, the record company can't delete your cassette. Nobody can steal your log-in and personal data from a VHS player or a CD carousel. Broadcast television sends data in only one direction.

Did you ever stop to think just how much info you're handing over when visiting a website? You should.

All for the convenience of watching a movie or listening to a tune that may or may not be available if you want it again tomorrow.

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Meme Dump!

By the Numbers...

Hey, look!

The 10 mm numbers guy will explain to you that his favored cartridge fires a bullet that is heavier than your .357 Mag. He’ll tell you that it has more momentum than your 9 mm. He’ll jeer that it has more foot-pounds of energy at 100 yards than your .45 ACP has at the muzzle; never mind that your .45 is bigger at 100 yards than his 10 mm is at the muzzle and, besides, nobody’s ever even seen a foot-pound. Are they even real?

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Tab Clearing...

• Norwegian F-35s tracking Russian Tu-95 Bears along NATO's northern flank.


• Real time video deepfakes make it easier to scam people live.


• The Russian school training the next generation of hackers, scammers, and influencers, all the better to mess with your mind and shape your opinions.

Memealicious!

QotD: Politics Edition...

Bobbi on Tuesday's primaries here in Indiana:

"All that money pouring in, those TV ads ... did bring people to the primary polls in record numbers, but that record still amounts to a 14.9% turnout instead of the usual single digits. Just over eighty-five percent of registered voters are, apparently, okay with whoever the rest of us pick."

One state senate primary contest that had millions of out-of-state dark money advertising dollars spent on it is likely to come down to three votes.
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I just noticed...

...that Cygnus, the third book in Marko's Frontlines: Evolution trilogy, is available for pre-order. (Release date is in December.) Publishers love it when you pre-order books, and that means authors do too, so I did my buddy a solid and pre-ordered.

Keeping them market signals flowing and all...

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Tab Clearing...

• Roberts: "Hey, you can't Dred a Scott without Plessying a few Fergusons."


• Second tallest megatsunami ever recorded happened in Alaska last year.


• Rain on the Scarecrow, Blood on the Plow v2.0

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Meme Dump!

Captain Outrageous has left the building.

Having lived in Atlanta from third grade through my early thirties, Ted Turner was everywhere. He owned a TV station and the Braves, he founded CNN, he won an America's Cup yacht race, and was always doing something that got him in the news and earned him the nickname "Captain Outrageous".

And now he's signed off for the last time.

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Memes For the Middle of the Week!

Primary Day!

It was primary election day here in Indiana.

I caught a ride with Bobbi to our local polling place and had her drop me off afterward.

Tab Clearing...

• Leftovers


• Being an informed voter, or "All politics is local"


• May the First?

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Meme Dump!

Dawning Realization...

I came to Heinlein late. A friend loaned me her copy of Stranger in a Strange Land in the mid Nineties and over the course of the next ten years I pretty much acquired and devoured everything he'd ever sold in print.

Not too long ago I made a point of re-reading most of it and found that, from a reading satisfaction level, his juveniles held up best for me. At least on balance, my feelings about them were generally the same as they were when I initially read them, whereas my opinions on a great deal of his later novels had cooled over the decades since my enthusiastic first brushes.

This morning, while performing my morning deep thought ritual, it hit me...

When I first encountered those juveniles, they were already hopelessly quaint, both from a science as well as a societal standpoint. They were science fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia but with Midwestern kids with rockets and rayguns, rather than English public school children with swords and castles. On the other hand, Job: A Comedy of Justice and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls were on the spinner rack in the grocery store where I had my first W-2 job.

Coming back to those books after a twenty or thirty year hiatus can make one feel disconnected. I didn't remember them feeling so old-fashioned and now I'm like the hypothetical GenZ'er that William Gibson envisioned reading Neuromancer for the first time, getting about a chapter in and thinking "Where are all the smartphones? I bet the plot will be about what happened to the phones."

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Star Wars Day

As everyone's favorite Jedi, Mister Spock always said...

No, seriously, have some actual Star Wars memes.

Monday Morning Memes!