frandroid

Today I have learned that you can ban a fellow user, and then they can't interact with you even though they can see whatever you let them see, and they can still read your comments on anyone's pages. I have learned this when trying to post an innocuous reply to a user I don't ever recall being cross to, though it's not impossible because I can be a dick sometimes. Whoop!

ETA: Holy cow was that a poorly worded post. It should be readable now.

Hey it only took me a year to setup the adjustable desk I bought! Yay me! Now to do my taxes...

Back when The Onion bought InfoWars, there was this whole thing about how "Onion owner Global Tetrahedron buys InfoWars for undisclosed sum", and this seemed like a fun mock company name to describe the Onion owners. Except... That's actually the name of the company. It turns out that The Onion itself was bought mostly by Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson, and is run by Collins, former disinformation reporter at NBC. The idea of buying The Onion was floated by Collins on Twitter, Lawson got interested, and they eventually bought it off the hedge fund (!!) which was the owner at that time. They brought the print edition back, they have a subscriber base even though the content is all free, and the whole purchase thing was done in collaboration with the paper's union. Lawson was basically interested in keeping The Onion alive and is not interested in doing a flip at some point. (He said he hopes he still owns The Onion when he dies.) It's really good media news overall. You can hear them discuss this with Nilay Patel on Decoder, The Verge's "how does this [tech] company actually work" podcast.

It's been a while since I've highlighted an episode from the Pirate History podcast, but here we go: Episode 269 - Scurvy Schoolmasters

Do you remember when I was posting about Pirate Utopias, and being rather upset that some of the core trade that the pirates at Salé engaged in was slave-trading and kidnapping? One of the early incarnations of Libertalia, another "Pirate Republic" in Mauritius, decided to ally itself with a local tribe, marry their women, and all benefited thanks to the trade that they were doing, mostly in cattle meat for other pirates to stock provisions. Eventually they started selling weapons to only that tribe, and the pirates and the tribe started raiding one of their rival tribes. First they were capturing cattle, but eventually they decided to capture their women, and enslaved them in a bordello for the use of the local pirates and other visiting pirates. So we're once again very far from progressive anarchist fantasies of piracy. The slaves eventually manage to make something good out of the situation but I won't spoil the episode further...

I was kind of tired when I was listening to the episode and can't recall why it's called that, sorry.

Did you know that "primer" is pronounced differently if you're talking about a book or a coat of paint??!

This is so annoying to me because people misuse/misspell the cognates premier/premiere all the time, and I thought I had primer down too...

So I think Canadaland was hit hard by Jesse's Zionist convulsions.

The first thing I noticed was that CL had joined the Acast network. It's basically a podcast advertising network. CL never had one of these before. I also just heard Jesse do an Audible recommendation. Audible has an affiliate network which is available to most podcasters I think, and I think CL had done Audible ads before, but it's literally been years since I heard an Audible plug on CL. The program seems to have generally lost favour with most podcasters, probably because other affiliate programs pay better.

Then I noticed that many of CL's old collaborators moved away: Mattea Roach went to CBC, Karyn Pugliese stepped down from her role as inaugural (and last, it seems) editor in chief, Jonathan Goldsbie is ostensibly on an 8 month Massey fellowship but that basically ended the Wag the Doug podcast. Justin Ling was an occasional collaborator who had been slated to take Goldsbie's Thursday slot but basically left after Brown forced edits/re-recording on an episode about Palestine (though not to actually censor things, but it just rubbed the wrong way).

As she was the most left person on CL, I was kind of upset that Émilie Nicolas kept with Brown. She even recorded a fairly earnest crowdfunding ad for the December campaign, highlighting how she felt that her interview with a Palestinian person was the highlight of her career. (I don't even remember the interview so I've requeued it--trying to recall if it really was that good?) But as the year ended, Nicolas announced that her show was over, in a fairly terse last episode. I personally think that her listenership declined and Brown ended her show due to both that and declining revenues.

She was never a challenge-the-interviewee type of person, but I was quite upset when she interviewed Michel Cormier, a respected former foreign correspondent at Radio-Canada/CBC who later was its director of information (he's retired now). She never asked him a single question about Israel/Palestine coverage in the middle of this genocide. I thought that was an immense miss. As a retired person, I'm sure he could have handled a couple questions about that.

So anyway. These are all symptoms...

"MORALITÉ: groupons-nous et demain la branlette internationale sera le genre humain!"

(I don't know how well automated translation will work on this quote or the whole post, but anyway: Branlettes du monde.... (NSFW in case you didn't catch the drift already)

Currently reading: I've restarted reading Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples from the beginning, because it had been so long since I had started it and barely remembered anything. Good thing I did because even re-reading the material, not very much is coming back to mind. I must had been reading it too fast last time. There are a few things I'm not grasping but I'm too lazy/sick/reading in bed to bother researching. Hopefully I can keep up.

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I think I'm on day 8 of this throat infection. I went to the walk-in clinic and the doc said it was viral, so no antibiotics for me. I think it's getting slightly better today. We'll see tomorrow, as it seems to be going better and worse all the time.

My boss has had another COVID infection. He had skipped the latest vaccine booster. I seriously worry for him. He has kids so they bring every virus back from school. He had RSV a while ago. I'm going to bet on him getting the norovirus by spring.

So I just had a Kati roll (think Indian taco bell-style burrito) which was warmed up in the microwave in a "crisping sleeve". I had no idea that you could get food to become crispy in the microwave. Game changer!