But you see, Maduro is an unhinged left-wing authoritarian, and trump is an unhinged right-wing authoritarian, so they’re very different!

I have an ortho I made, and I just couldn’t get used to it. I’ve never had any keyboard-related RSI, and my “spider dance” typing is very much a hand-eye coordination task, so… ehhh. No neuroplasticity for it.

I don’t know of anything marketed as such, though some ortholinear POS terminals can be easily repurposed into big keyboards. The ortho users tend to be very interested in ergonomics, and one of the guiding principles there is minimizing hand movement (sometimes I personally think this goes a bit far; it seems to me that if it’s good to move the rest of your body from time to time, it’s good to move your arms and hands too). Most of them are quite small. The biggest size I’ve seen regularly is 75 keys in a 15x5 grid. Of course, ortho/ergo is also a very DIY-friendly space, so sometimes you see… outliers. LOL.

The lack of an endorsement is a big blow to Trump, who invited O’Brien to be the first Teamsters leader in the union’s 121-year history to speak at the Republican National Convention in July.

Sounds like O’Brien knows that he went a step too far in assuming a Trump win was inevitable and kissing the diaper.

Why do you think I still live in Texas?

I don’t know if he hates it, but it’s definitely tied to something almost compulsive:

His mother urged him to go to college, but he dropped out of East Carolina University after two weeks. Instead of going to class, he spent most of his time on campus editing videos in his car.

“That’s all I ever talked about at school. I thought I was a freak of nature,” he told content creators and podcasters Colin and Samir in September. “People would tell me, ‘All you do is talk about YouTube videos. You’re too obsessed with YouTube. Get a life…’”

…In past interviews, Donaldson has said he studied the YouTube recommendation algorithm and other creators’ stats meticulously to come up with a recipe for making his videos popular.

So this fairly counts as light reading, but my kiddo just finished the Amari YA series by B.B. Alston. It’s basically Harry Potter meets Men in Black, but with an actually diverse cast. The main character and her family are from urban Atlanta. Super derivative of course, with it’s chosen-one narrative and coming of age, but it’s a page turner with fun universe-building, and I like being able to talk to my daughter about what she’s been reading.

I’m also working through 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline. I understand some of the conclusions are a bit dated, but he’s a well-known scholar in the field and it’s very readable. Even if he’s a bit dramatic about who did what to whom, it’s real archaeology and not your Gavin Menzies conspiratorial nonsense.

I find that I can read okay on phones, especially with a night-mode, but an e-Reader hits that sweet spot for an even nicer paper-ish screen and the intentionality of a book, while still having digital convenience. The intentionality may actually be the most important part for me: the Kindle means it’s reading time. I also keep mine on airplane mode 99% of the time, so the battery lasts forever and I can almost treat it like a paper book.

Fair enough. That makes a lot of sense. I have heard that the failure model for this thing likely would have been some cracking sounds, and then the implosion, but I probably shouldn’t speculate quite so hard. At any rate, the whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen, and whaddaya know, it did.

At approximately 2,274 meters, the Titan sent the message, “All good here,” according to the animation.

The last communication from the submersible was sent at approximately 3,341 meters: “Dropped two wts,” meaning drop weights, according to the Coast Guard.

All communications and tracking from the submersible to Polar Prince were lost at 3,346 meters, according to the Coast Guard.

I’m assuming a lot here, but dropping weights would likely mean they were trying to ascend. They may have had just over five meters’ worth of knowing something was going wrong (whatever that means in terms of time) before the implosion.

Judge for yourself.

“threads.net” = downvote, I reckon

I was all but bending over backwards trying to hear how it might have been just a slip, bringing to bear the fact that both words have a nasal consonant and hard ‘g’ sounds, but… nope. He enunciates an ‘n’ again, clearly after he’s done saying “Haitian” and therefore where it doesn’t belong, and then he gets all the way to the hard ‘-er’, a “murmur diphthong” that simply doesn’t exist in ‘immigrant’ or ‘migrant’. The most charitable explanation with any plausibility whatsoever is that the n-word is a part of his spoken vocabulary and he failed to censor himself quickly enough.

Fuckin’ gross.

So I had to look this one up, and admittedly my patience for these rabbit holes peters out, but yes, it’s most likely a regular passport.

I guess they do some SovCit shenanigans while applying and they think it makes it a super-secret diplomatic and sales-tax immunity passport that will 100% for sure you guys show up when it’s scanned, especially when you wave it in front Darlene at Walmart who defintely has time for your bullshit. It’s all been reinforced by the fact that different batches of land-transit passport cards will come with different numbers of asterisks towards the top, so they think there’s a magic code there that is related to status and privileges.

I’m guessing they had to keep dialing back the crazy until the State Department was finally willing to process their application, and surprise surprise, our SovCit friend found that process onerous.

Apart from everything else, that’s quite the immune system.

Cadets and Midshipmen are recommended by elected officials, and their future employers have management needs that will go way beyond “Cooper got two points higher on the SAT after his parents paid for twenty prep classes.” I will be interested to see what this particular SCOTUS thinks when confronted with the US military saying “we need this to optimize national security.”

I read through some of the guy’s twitterings yesterday. He was not well, to put it mildly.

I’m sure Mister King is problematic in many ways, but for a Southern corporate lawyer from the early 1900s, he’s pretty boring to judge from a quick internet search.

Mine is something called a “Mobile Mug”. It’s a hollow plastic cup (polypropylene appparently) with a rubber friction-fit bottom. I’m just barely old enough that as a young law student, mugs of brewed coffee were still the most common legal stimulant for 1L’s in the library. I lost the lid years ago, but in honor of getting back to my DS9 re-watch mixed with new-watch, I dug it out for some French press rocket fuel.

Then I promptly forgot it was on the table and poured the coffee into a random Starbucks-knockoff plastic to-go cup.

“figure out what a peaceful settlement looks like,”

Per the article, followed immediately by ceding the currently occupied parts of Ukraine to Russia and Ukraine promising never to join NATO or “related” organizations. Ukraine gets a “demilitarized” zone to do what, of course, THE INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNIZED BORDER was supposed to do.

Fucking hell. We wouldn’t ask Iran for terms like that, but a maturing democracy that is allied with us… it’s fine. After all, the west did shitty things like “offering a more appealing value proposition.” Trump is not even good at being a hegemonic power.