"Are your glasses doxxing me?"

The pace of technological change comes at you fast, and it has a lot of implications that may not be immediately apparent.

Take these seemingly unrelated facts:

• High-resolution digital cameras are tiny and ubiquitous.
• Bluetooth, WiFi, and 5G connectivity is portable and everywhere.
• Facial recognition technology continues to advance by leaps and bounds.
• Everybody's in some sort of database these days.

Now, this caused a stink recently when people were using Meta's smart glasses to doxx random people via facial recognition, but there's no need to be using funky prototype smart glasses when your phone has a camera and the ability to locate and lock on to faces and you could theoretically, I dunno, just carry it backwards in your shirt pocket...

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What in the wide, wide world of sports?

So, a little after seven AM on Saturday morning, a dude here in Indianapolis wanders out to his truck with three kids in tow. He unlocks the truck, retrieves the pistol that he'd had in the cab, cranks a round off into the air, and then hands it to one of the kids, who proceeds to do likewise. The kids then pass it around, each of them popping a few rounds into the sky... at a 45 degree angle, you know, ensuring the bullet will travel as far as possible ...before handing the pistol back to its owner who then empties most of the rest of the mag into the clouds.

It's all on video.

The dude got arrested and, you know what? Good. Lock his ass up for a bit. And he better have to forfeit the blaster, too. Clip a corner off my lolbertarian card or whatever, but maybe gun ownership isn't for him.

Does this look like there's a safe direction in any direction?

Tab Clearing...

• Felon down! (I wonder if you can see the exposed screws on those things from orbit?)


• I was assured this kind of racist crap only happened in the past.


• The Atlantic seems to be worried that cancellation is losing its clout.

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Bad Info Drives Out Good

Greg Ellifritz put up an informative post on social media regarding the (in)efficacy of birdshot in a home defense role recently.

It was shared widely on the internet with predictable results, as the legions of shambling mouth-breathers tried to set Greg straight.

He's had about enough of that.

"I got my first shotgun instructor certification in 1999. I’ve been teaching shotgun skills longer than some of these commentators have been alive. I carried a shotgun every day in a 25-year police career and used those shotguns to convince some very bad men to submit to arrest. I’ve seen, treated, and investigated gunshot wounds from birdshot, buckshot, and slugs. I’ve killed lots of critters with shotguns in the hunting fields. I’ve attended countless shotgun ballistic gelatin shooting demonstrations and autopsies of victims killed with shotgun pellets. I’ve written 162 different articles on using the shotgun for self defense as well as producing the largest firearms stopping power research study in the last two decades.

I might know a thing or two about what shotgun pellets do to human bodies.

But when I try to share that knowledge with the general public, I get shit upon from the anonymous population of uneducated internet trolls who gain self esteem from insulting other people."

Bad info drives out good. I definitely know the feeling, as it's why I rarely discuss gun stuff in GenPop-accessible places myself these days.

Save the birdshot for birds.

Tab Clearing...

• Basically, nowadays Twitter is just 4chan but with a constant barrage of ads for crypto schemes and janky Chinese consumer goods, except 4chan doesn't keep pestering you to give them eight bucks a month.


• Flaco the owl's glorious year of freedom has come to a sad ending.


• Some men just want to watch the world burn.

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Apotheosis of the Karens

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who's down on karens.com, or as it's more formally known, NextDoor.

"Are you bummed you weren’t around when the Stasi ruled? Do you wish you could’ve been one of Mao Zedong’s millions of neighborhood snitches? Maybe watch the Red Guards drag off your least favorite aunt?

Not to worry, the bad old days are back — thanks to Nextdoor.com.

On Nextdoor all you have to do is sign up, log in and start profiling everyone on your block. Teenager in a hoodie walking on your street? Lock your doors. Black guy with a backpack standing on the corner? Call the cops."

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Can I get an "amen"?

"[T]his disaffected bloc of Americans (and the poor souls living in swing states) will have to endure months on end of extreme partisan rhetoric, negative advertising, cable news vitriol, and people losing their minds on X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok about other people’s political views and choices—all fueled by billions of dollars in unaccountable funds from wealthy sources and activist groups that are perfectly content to see the country break in two for ideological or financial gain.

[SNIP]

The only rational form of self-protection from this madness is to refuse to engage in America’s misshapen partisan politics and to instead pursue other forms of citizenship.

Focus on something other than politics. Talk with friends and colleagues about anything other than partisan divides and culture war clickbait. Turn off and disable the media and tech sources spreading partisan negativity. Turn the mind towards something positive and constructive in life rather than imbibing party propaganda designed to make people anxious, confused, angry, or vengeful."

To be knee-deep in the Very Online kulturkampf these days is to drink from a firehose of negativity and panic and anger, because that's what gets the clicks and the donations and the virality.

To see a politician's TV ad is to be bombarded with images and messages suggesting the country is on the verge of ruin unless you vote for our guy... oh, and help us save America by giving us money by texting CANDIDATE to 12345.

The effect is to keep your "fight-or-flight" reflex on constant low burn, keeping your brain simmering in a 24/7 broth of stress hormones.

Unplug from that shit. Go a week without talking to anybody about anything political. Otherwise you're going to find yourself listening to a podcaster or vlogger rambling about how the CIA Deep State is rigging Taylor Swift to make Travis win the Vaccine Bowl for Biden or whatever cockamamie nonsense is making the rounds now. If you do find yourself watching that and nodding along, you need to go outside and touch some grass, friend.

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Fashionably Dumb

My eye started twitching the first time I heard about books being sold by the foot, available in whatever colors were needed to complement a room's decor.

This site, for instance, sells "Authentic books for interior design, décor, wedding centerpieces, movie props, staging and more!" At least they sell "authentic" books. If that's too much trouble, or you want to avoid the musty smell of pages full of knowledge in your living room, you can buy fake ones online at BezosMart. Ironic, if you ask me, given Amazon's humble origins.

Since social media can ruin anything, even something as awful as decorative books, it's now working on doing it to this trend. Interior Design TikTok has come up with a name for it: "Bookshelf Wealth".

Kailee Blalock, an interior designer in San Diego, posted a video to TikTok last month that sought to define bookshelf wealth and school viewers in achieving the aesthetic in their own homes.

“These aren’t display books,” Ms. Blalock, 26, cautions in the video, which has been viewed over 1.3 million times. “These are books that have actually been curated and read.”

I wonder if I can get a job working for an interior designer where I break the spines on books, dog-ear a few pages, scribble a random note or two in the margins, and maybe leave a yellowed old Fresh Market receipt in the pages like a bookmark.

QotD: Misanthropy Edition

From a web discussion elsewhere:

”Morons are nature’s original renewable resource.”

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Enshittification Finally Caught Me

I'd heard others complain about the the current parlous state of Amazon search results before, but had yet to really experience them for myself.

I mean, if I'm going to go get some Pom pepper spray from the Pom store or a box of Surefire CR123 batteries from the Surefire store or a Terry Pratchett book from Kindle, there's not a lot of searching involved. I know what I'm looking for and going right to the thing, like way back in the day when I won a bet with a friend by going into a Gap store and finding the shelf my jeans were on with my eyes closed.

And when I'm buying groceries direct from Amazon Fresh, they're unlikely to try to steer me to a third party vendor selling DIET MOUNTIAN DAW.

But generalized search is a hot mess, apparently. Per Cory Doctorow:

"Searching Amazon doesn't produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon's "Most Favored Nation" requirement sellers means that they can't sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for "cat beds" and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for "cat bed" are 50% ads."

The other day I realized I needed a fresh batch of winter socks and so, not wanting to drive over to Meijer, plugged "wool socks" into Amazon's search dingus.

Now, I'm no connoisseur of insulated hosiery, but I'm pretty sure that I'd never heard of XoxOY or Insoool or these other companies offering me $3.99 six-packs of wool socks with thousands of positive ratings written in some dialect of ESL whose origin was hard to pin down.

Fortunately I recollected that Browning licensed their name to a line of outdoor clothing and I'd had their wool socks before, so I plugged "Browning wool socks" in and found some that looked like the ones I'd had and were sold by and shipped from Amazon proper.

Then this morning I noticed it was supposed to piss-pour rain all day and frankly my sole remaining umbrella is on its last legs. So, hey-ho, off to BezosMart!

Friends, if I'm uninformed on socks, I'm positively ignorant on umbrellas. My umbrella-buying experience has generally been limited to grabbing a Totes off the rack at the drug store or Target and tossing it in with the soda and chips in my basket.

I'm sure there is an umbrella equivalent to a Glock: durable, workmanlike, reasonably-priced. Likewise there's probably a Rolls Royce of umbrellas, made by English brolly craftsmen to exacting standards of workmanship and constructed of the best materials well enough that your grandkids will be able to use it to stay dry at their parents' funerals.

I have no idea what those umbrella brands are, though, but I'm pretty sure that they're not being sold in three-packs for $7.99 by WOW-DRY. I'd be afraid to open one of those umbrellas for fear of finding a note written in Malay saying "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a Sihanoukville umbrella factory!"

In the end I bought one that seemed not too terribly scammy or gimmicky and was priced reasonably commensurately with its purported features.

We'll see how it goes.

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Introvert Nightmares...

I hate those dreams where you get stuck in awkward and uncomfortable situations, like the one where the temp agency mistakenly sent me to be the starting quarterback for an imaginary NFL team... the Smallville Ocelots or Anytown Meerkats or whatever. Then there was the one where I was trapped for an excruciatingly long 20-floor elevator ride with the Obamas, trying to come up with the sort of pleasantly apolitical small talk that one resorts to when one is trapped in a confined space with extroverted strangers.

Last night I dreamed I was in my mid-20s, and I had to go on a road trip to pick up my mom from the hospital and bring her back to my place. And accompanying me on this roadtrip was (also inexplicably young) Tucker Carlson. 

We took Tucker's Karmann Ghia, and I spent hours cooped up in a car with someone whom I was desperate to avoid talking about anything remotely political with. And then of course there's the return leg of the trip with mom crammed in the car with us and now I have to worry about her saying something political too.

I'd rather have spent sixty floors in an elevator with Barry and Michelle. Lordy that was an excruciating nightmare.

You're not entitled to your own facts.

So, there was this guy claiming that "librarians gleefully threw Cat In The Hat [sic] on the bonfire".

When called on his falsehood, he got snippy.

I have no interest in visiting his blog to "argue further" because there's nothing to argue, as the thing he is claiming happened only happened in his imagination.

Let's help out Matt's short memory: 

What actually happened is that Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the company that manages Theodor Geisel's estate, asked Random House, the company that prints his books, to take six titles (And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot's Pool, On Beyond Zebra!, Scrambled Eggs Super!, and The Cat's Quizzer) out of print, due to illustrations and/or words that they felt portrayed dated and negative ethnic stereotypes.

You will note the complete absence from the actual facts of the following three things: librarians, bonfires, and The Cat in the Hat.

Now, you can agree with this decision or not (I personally find it pretty questionable and feel that it smacks of overreaction) and you are certainly entitled to your own opinion.

But you aren't entitled to your own facts.

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QotD: Ivory Tower Revolutionaries Edition...

"Institutions that once espoused a deep respect for the American federal republic, like the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College have become havens for authoritarian nutters as bad -- and as willing to inspire bloodshed -- as any Mercedes-driving Ivy-League Marxist.

Not a one of them knows how to get bloodstains out of tweed or would be willing to do the work if you showed them how, either." -RobertaX

Rod Dreher is fixin' to lead the rugged Christian masculine resistance against the decadence and degeneracy of GloboHomo...just as soon as he finishes these simply divine oysters.

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You can't be serious.

"Fellas, is it gay to make millions shilling beer and then bang Taylor Swift while wearing two Super Bowl rings?"

Man, the perverse incentives of the Culture War sure make people say absolutely moronic things to get clicks.

Also, this inane division of consumer products, restaurants, and even musical tastes by sociopolitical faction is idiotic. A nation cannot long stand half Chick-Fil-A and half Panera Bread.

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Tab Clearing...

• Oh, FFS... Elmo's goon army is at it again.


• "He was such a quiet kid." Forewarned is forearmed.


• Panasonic needs to just give up with that "Lumix" branding.

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Useless Karens

I often refer to NextDoor as "Karens dot com", and for good reason.

While it might be useful for parting with the occasional used appliance, getting a recommendation for a local tree removal service, or posting lost dog notices, the vast majority of the content on the site is an annoying morass of Gladys Kravitzes with too much time on their hands airing their beefs and paranoid fantasies.

"Just a heads up. There was a group of Black youths with backpacks walking down Elm Street at 8AM this morning and they were looking around at the houses."

"Lady, you're a block away from Elm Street Elementary. I think I can crack this case."

As an example of how useless the site is as a neighborhood news service, witness the following.

My out-of-town friends and I were having lunch at the new location of The Gallery Pastry Shop, down at 46th & College Avenue a couple Thursdays ago, when we noticed that the air outside was thick with smoke. So thick, as a matter of fact, that the air inside the restaurant was pungent with the smell of it in short order.

Pretty soon various IFD vehicles came streaming by. Obviously there was a pretty good size fire a block or two to our west.

When we left the restaurant, we went to go see if we could do some rubbernecking, and boy howdy...

Yup, that's a bleepin' fire alright. A big one, tying up a good percentage of the IFD's gear on the near north side. We counted at least six big-ass fire engines, to say nothing of all the smaller vehicles.

Searching NextDoor over the next several days? Crickets. 

Well, not crickets, exactly, just the usual chatter about missing pets and suspiciously parked cars. Not bupkis on the ginormous house fire, though.

Thanks, Karens.

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The first rule of Dunning-Kruger Club...

...is you don't know you're in Dunning-Kruger Club.

There's a whole comments section* full of people trying to explain the realities of legal self-defense to Grant Cunningham. You know, the Grant Cunningham who has had the forwards for his books written by Massad Ayoob.

The best thing about the internet is that it's so full of expertise. The worst part of the internet is every man-jack on it thinks that they're one of the experts.

Shootin' Buddy and I playing bingo with our fellow students' questions in Guy Relford's Comprehensive Indiana Gun Law class, back in '14.

*You'd think I'd know better than to read the comments by now, right?

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Pestering...

Got a couple internet marketing guys in my email inbox, inquiring about the "article publishing fee" on the blog.

When I don't reply to their cold emails...because why would I?...they send a series of increasingly miffed-sounding followups, demanding to know the cost of posting an article for their client here on VFTP. (Well, they never refer to the blog by its name, only by its URL. They're somewhere in Lahore or Mumbai or Jakarta. They don't actually read the blog; they're just doing cut-rate web marketing for a third party.)

There's no point in replying "Bro, you can't write in my diary," so I just keep round-filing their emails until they take the hint.

Sometimes it can take a while.

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Sounds horrifying...

An interesting piece on The Villages in Florida and their coming demographic crisis featured this creepy little tidbit:

I rented a golf cart during my visit, paying $25 for a day of puttering around. It was mid‑May, so already fairly hot. Presumably due to the combination of age and weather, there weren’t many people out. On the main cart thoroughfares, golfers would whiz past my speed‑regulated rental, prompting me to offer repeated apologetic waves. There are wide‑open gates at the entrances to the various villages, policed by local residents who nod everyone through. Most residential streets that morning were empty, treeless under a cloudless blue sky. Driveways were occasionally ornate and, to a house, clean, but nearly every house was shut up tight. People were watching, though; one woman with whom I spoke as she was watering plants assured me that she would receive multiple calls after I left to inquire about who I was and why I was there.

Shut up, Cletus.

Watching dudes like the Facebook commenter quoted over at Prof. Yamane's blog thump their chests and posture and try to basically run off anybody who dares trespass on the sacred territory of their hobby is so frustrating.

You're why we can't have nice things, Cletus.

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