2025-12-31 05:49:49
Yesterday I linked to a Windows 3.x NYT crossword puzzle app from 1992 that you can play directly on the Internet Archive. I was a Windows user back in the day (my conversion to Apple didn’t happen until the early 00s) and so of course I had to see what other Win3.x games they had in their collection and re-discovered a couple of old favorites:
Ok, that’s enough, I need to get back to work!
Tags: video games · Windows
2025-12-31 04:48:07
A wildlife photographer “discovered thousands of dinosaur footprints preserved in the vertical face of a mountainside” in the Italian Alps dating back 200M years. “This is now really one of the most important places for Triassic dinosaur footprints.”
2025-12-31 03:55:25
Toby Buckle for the New Republic: The Americans Who Saw All This Coming — But Were Ignored and Maligned.
This is not that far from the position many ordinary Americans found themselves in at the start of the Trump era. They weren’t time travelers but saw what was coming clearly enough. They called Trump’s movement fascist from the very start, and often predicted specific milestones of our democratic decline well in advance. They were convinced they were right — and often beside themselves with worry. Accordingly, they did everything they could to get others to listen.
But not enough people did, and many attacked them — even as events proved them right, again and again. As late as February 2025, respected legal commentator Noah Feldman was casually asserting our constitutional system was “working fine” and Jon Stewart was scolding people who used the word “fascist,” claiming all they had done “over the last ten years is cry wolf.”
I’m glad Buckle wrote about this…it’s infuriating. Who were the folks attempting to sound the alarm?
The first thing to say about fascism’s Cassandras is they’re usually women. Not all women are Cassandras (most aren’t), but most Cassandras are women. My sense is that Black Americans, of either gender, are likelier than whites to be Cassandras, and trans and nonbinary people are heavily overrepresented within the group.
I was posting about Trump’s authoritarianism in the months before the 2016 election1 because I felt it was pretty easy to spot but mostly because I was listening to the sorts of people that Buckle interviews in his piece: predominately Black, many women, many LGBTQ+ folks. And what were they saying? Jamelle Bouie, then a columnist at Slate, stated it plainly in Nov 2015: Donald Trump Is a Fascist. Buckle again:
What were they afraid of? Authoritarianism, political violence, racism, sexism, corruption, as well as threats to bodily autonomy and LGBT rights, were the common themes. Everyone mentioned at least one of those, and the vast majority mentioned multiple. “All the implications that I knew the election would have that have all come true, essentially,” as Emily, a 38-year-old white female writer in Chicago, put it. Cassandras are defined by seeing in MAGA not just policies they disagreed with but a loaded gun pointed at the heart of our politics and culture. “It just felt to me like we were the Weimar Republic; the lying press, the way he was weaponizing American people … the othering of people — Hispanics, they’re rapists, and all of that,” said Sonia, a 52-year-old white woman who works in marketing in Los Angeles.
The anti-alarmists — Buckle lists several of them: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Bret Stephens, Corey Robin, Jon Stewart, David Brooks, William Watson, John Harris, Simon Jenkins, Zachary Karabell, Josh Barro, and Noah Feldman — scolded and derided the Cassandras. Going forward, we should be skeptical of giving them and others like them our attention when they pooh pooh people fighting against obvious racism, fascism, and kleptocracy; dismiss these dangers as mere partisan differences, culture wars, wokeism, or rhetoric; and argue for what amounts to meeting the nazis halfway.
Tags: 2025 Coup · Donald Trump · fascism · Jamelle Bouie · politics · Toby Buckle
2025-12-31 02:58:21
Oh this is devilish…a game where you have make to 45 groups of 45 items each by matching two at a time. Must take hours? (Where’s the multiplayer option when you need it?)
2025-12-31 02:02:05
Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the bar in this Vanity Fair video.
This is, for me, even a little more personal than the previous movies because faith and religion is at the heart of this movie. And I grew up very Christian. I grew up not Catholic. This movie is set in a Catholic church. I grew up Protestant, kind of what we would call evangelical today. I was a youth group kid and it wasn’t just that my parents took me to church. I really, my whole perspective in life was really based on a relationship with Christ. It was very important to me. I’m not anymore, I’ve kind of grown away from that later in life, but it’s still something that I have deep feelings about. So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me to take both of those perspectives inside me and get them talking with each other.
The practical effect with the photograph (~10:05 mark) was 💯.
Tags: film school · movies · Rian Johnson · video · Wake Up Dead Man
2025-12-31 01:05:59
ProPublica launches Rx Inspector database. “We’ve launched a first-of-its-kind app to help you find out where your generic drugs come from and see the track records of the factories that made them.”