Regarding — and, Well, Against — Substack

Wednesday, 20 November 2024

We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.

I am upset by the above, but only insofar as I’m jealous that I had never thought to make the analogy to an author telling people to “read my Amazon”. A publication on Substack is no more “a Substack” than a blog on WordPress is “a WordPress”. It’s really quite a nifty — but devious — trick that Substack has pulled to make this parlance a thing.

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down... four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.

I know quite a few people whose opinions I admire who feel the same way as Dash here. I’ll disagree. I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.

You might disagree. Like I said, I know a bunch of good, smart people who see Substack like Dash does, and refuse to pay for any publication on Substack’s platform because of their “Hey we’re just a neutral publishing platform, not an editor, let alone a censor” stance. What I can say, personally, is that I read and pay for several publications on Substack, and for the last few weeks I’ve tried using their iOS app (more on this in a moment), and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.¹

What I object to isn’t their laissez faire approach to who they allow to publish on their platform, but rather how they present all publications. People do call the publications on Substack “Substacks”. And Substack publications do all look the same, most of them right down to that telltale serif typeface, Spectral,² which is kerned so loosely it looks like teeth in need of orthodontia. It’s not an ugly font, per se, but it is very distinctive, which contributes, I think significantly, to the blurring of the branding line between Substack publications as discrete standalone independent entities or as mere sections under “Substack” as an umbrella publication.

Substack, very deliberately, has from the get-go tried to have it both ways. They say that publications on their platform are independent voices and brands. But they present them all as parts of Substack. They all look alike, and they all look like “Substack”. I really don’t get why any writer trying to establish themselves independently would farm out their own brand this way. It’s the illusion of independence.

I absolutely despise that a Substack publication’s home page is, typically, nothing more than a sign-up field for your email address to get the publication by email, and a small “No thanks” link to actually read the damn thing. Half the time when I see that page, I just close the tab out of spite. In what world is “No thanks” a good link to convey the meaning “Let me read the thing I came here to read”?

Substack’s app, along with the company’s home page, defaults to presenting itself as a Twitter-like short-form posting platform. As if what we need right now is another Twitter-like platform. But especially: why would would anyone want to participate in a social platform tied to one specific publishing platform? It doesn’t make any sense to me, as a reader, nor do I see the appeal to writers on the platform. It only makes sense strategically from Substack’s own perspective. If, as a writer, your feedback and social interaction with your audience is tied to Substack’s own social graph, your publication is tied to Substack, too. It’s so transparently a lock-in play that it’s almost hard to object to it. It’s right there on the tin. But it’s not hard at all to just not use it.

Substack no longer even hosts a majority of the newsletter-style writers I subscribe to. Casey Newton moved Platformer from Substack to Ghost in January. Craig Calcaterra moved his excellent baseball-focused-but-with-heavy-dashes-of-politics-and-pop-culture Cup of Coffee from Substack to Beehiiv in January as well. Molly White runs Citation Needed on Ghost. My newest paid subscription is to CNN expat Oliver Darcy’s new media-industry focused Status, for which he chose Beehiiv. And of course there’s my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery, running on his own platform Passport, not only long predates Substack but served as their model to replicate. (Substack’s pitch deck was “Stratechery in a box.”) All of these sites look distinctive, with their own brand. All of them offer much better subscription and delivery management interfaces than Substack.

My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack last, not first. Not because Substack is a Nazi bar, which I don’t think it is at all, but simply because there are clearly better options, and the company’s long term goal is clearly platform lock-in. ★

I feel the same way about social media platforms. Are there people I find objectionable on Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads? Definitely. On YouTube? Even more definitely. Do I care? No, because I tend never to see their posts, and when one pops up, I can block or mute them, and I never see them again. That’s in contrast with X, the former Twitter, where the top replies to many posts are from first class shitbird trolls. More and more I simply find X an unpleasant place to devote any of my attention, and so I go there less and less. I don’t eat at restaurants whose food I dislike, and the food at X tastes bad and is only getting worse. ↩︎︎
A free Google font, which says something about Substack. ↩︎︎

Wednesday, 20 November 2024

Apple Is Selling Apple News Ads Directly for the First Time ★

Sara Fischer, reporting for Axios:

Apple has started selling its own advertising inventory for Apple News, two sources familiar with the effort told Axios. It’s pitching new ad units that it hopes will maximize revenue for itself and its publishing partners. [...]

Publishers will get a 70% cut of the ad revenue sold by Apple within their articles.

They will get a percentage of the ad revenue sold by Apple within the Apple News feed, dependent on engagement with their content.

Apple News publishers will continue to receive 100% of the revenue from the advertising that they sell against their content in the app.

Apple News+ is a really good product. Scanning its main Today tab in the morning has become my modern-day equivalent of scanning the front page of a printed newspaper — a way to get a sense of what’s going on in world news. There’s a level of editorial curation and presentation in Apple News that I don’t think has a peer. Apple News itself doesn’t publish or report anything, but there’s clearly a talented, level-headed editorial team that is picking and choosing the most important and most interesting (which are often very different things) stories from a wide variety of sources. So maybe a better analogy to the bygone era of print isn’t scanning the front page of a newspaper, but rather stopping at a good big-city newsstand where you could scan the front pages of a slew of newspapers from around the country (and world).

I don’t look to Apple News for anything related to tech. I definitely want to do that via RSS (which for me means NetNewsWire), the web (Safari), and social media. But for national, world, and general interest news, Apple News is really good. I don’t know what it’s like without a News+ subscription, but with one, it’s truly excellent. And a News+ subscription gets you access to a bunch of great publications with paywalls on the web.

If you cemented your opinion of Apple News years ago and tuned out, you should give it a fresh look — especially if you have a “free” News+ subscription via Apple One.

But, my god, the ads suck — low-rent and highly repetitive. I posted screen recordings over the summer illustrating this. It seems like recently, though, I’ve seen fewer ads, and they’ve gotten less repetitive. I just spent a few minutes now perusing the Today tab while writing this post, and I read a bunch of articles without seeing any ads at all. For me at least, the Apple News ad experience seems to be getting better already. But there’s still so much room for improvement.

Whenever I write about this, some readers will comment that, to their minds, a paid subscription like Apple News+ should bestow a completely ad-free experience. That’s how streaming video and music subscriptions tend to work, but even there — as I just posted regarding Disney+ — many people are choosing lower-priced streaming subscriptions subsidized by ads. The economics for ad-free news just don’t work, and never have. News+ isn’t like TV+, where Apple owns or has paid for the rights to all of the content.

Bob Iger Inadvertently Reveals Percentage of Disney+ Subscribers on Ad-Supported Tier ★

Dade Hayes, reporting for Deadline:

Fielding a question from a Wall Street analyst about the growth outlook and pricing strategy of Disney+, Iger divulged how many Disney+ subscribers take the ad-supported tier in the U.S. (37%) and globally (30%). The disclosure was unusual in the streaming sector. Netflix, for instance, has never broken out a similar percentage, preferring instead to report monthly active users of its ad tier (as it did earlier this week).

When the Q&A with analysts moved to the next question and CFO Hugh Johnston was giving his answer, Iger’s voice suddenly could be heard on the call. “I don’t know if I was supposed to disclose those AVOD numbers,” he said, before Johnston continued speaking.

Looking at Disney+’s pricing page (and ignoring the wide assortment of bundle offers), their ad-supported “Basic” tier costs $10/month; their ad-free “Premium” tier costs $16/month or $160/year.

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

‘Can You Take a Photo of Us?’ ★

Delightfully clever sketch from Tiny Idea.

‘Inside the Rather Bizarre Relaunch of Jaguar’ ★

James Baggott, writing for Car Dealer Magazine:

Jaguar unveiled a new look, logo and direction for its cars at what was quite possibly the most bizarre automotive media launch I’ve ever attended — here’s what happened.

Embargoed until today, the event felt like a hallucinogenic sci-fi movie where the presenters were only allowed to speak in marketing babble. Unveiling a new concept car — the details of which are still under embargo until December 3 — Jaguar’s passionate team spoke for most of the day about how they plan to ‘delete ordinary’ and ‘live vivid’. Whatever that means…

In what, at times, felt like a drunken dream, Jaguar personnel walked journalists through its plans to ‘reimagine’ the much-loved brand over the next few years. Calling it a ‘complete reset’, McGovern at one point told journalists that his team had ‘not been sniffing the white stuff — this is real’.

Translation: they’ve all been sniffing a metric ton of the white stuff. This looks like the identity for a women’s razor brand or something. Certainly not the identity for a longstanding British sports car company.

Lulu Cheng Meservey:

Jaguar already nailed their marketing decades ago, and given the demand for nostalgia, now would’ve been the perfect time to revive it.

Instead, the sad irony is that their “Copy nothing” campaign abandons their own originality in favor of a fad that peaked during the pandemic.

Dr. Oz

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

The Hollywood Reporter, which of course is where one now goes to find news of incoming Executive Branch appointments and nominations, “Trump Nominates Dr. Mehmet Oz to Run Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services”:

“America is facing a Healthcare Crisis, and there may be no Physician more qualified and capable than Dr. Oz to Make America Healthy Again,” Trump said in a statement. “He is an eminent Physician, Heart Surgeon, Inventor, and World-Class Communicator, who has been at the forefront of healthy living for decades. Dr. Oz will work closely with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take on the illness industrial complex, and all the horrible chronic diseases left in its wake.”

He added, “He won nine Daytime Emmy Awards hosting The Dr. Oz Show, where he taught millions of Americans how to make healthier lifestyle choices, and gave a strong voice to the key pillars of the MAHA Movement.”

I met Dr. Oz ten years ago. It was after the Apple event on Tuesday, 9 September 2014, at the Flint Center in Cupertino, where Apple unveiled Apple Watch after introducing the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple had erected a startlingly large temporary building in front of the Flint Center, which, post-event, was opened to attending media and celebrities to showcase Apple Watch’s various capabilities. But post-event press briefings were held inside the Flint Center, in a byzantine complex of subterranean rooms beneath the massive ground floor auditorium.

I had a one-on-one off-the-record briefing with Jony Ive. (Fascinating and fun — we spent most of the all-too-brief 30 minutes talking about watch bands and the exquisite packaging and charging case of the Edition models.) The waiting area for these press briefings was set up to look a bit like a mostly empty Apple Store. The central focus of this waiting area was a large table with a glass top; under the glass were a variety of Apple Watch models. The table was a prototype of the ones that Apple would put in its retail stores, for which they obtained multiple patents. While I was waiting for my briefing with Ive, the only other person from the media waiting with me was Oz.

It’s a weird thing to be alone, effectively, with someone of Oz’s celebrity. It’s like being in a room with a million dollars in $100 bills stacked in a perfectly-arranged pyramid. No matter how you to try to direct your attention, your mind keeps popping back to Holy shit, there’s a million dollars in cash right there. His hair was perfect, his shirt crisply pressed. It was a very nice shirt. He smiled at all times, and seemed genuinely happy to be there, and genuinely interested in Apple Watch, but not for what Apple Watch actually was or could be, but simply because it was a major new thing, and he was a VIP invitee at the introduction of this major new thing. And my mind would pop, for the umpteenth time, Holy shit, that’s Dr. Oz right there.

We spent an unceasingly awkward 10 minutes circling around that table together. He never shut up. He chattered, nonstop, with inane observations, like “Hey, look at that one, it’s orange! What’s that one, leather?” He was not talking to me, nor was he, really, talking to himself. It was like he was talking to a TV camera, as though we were being filmed for B-roll footage for his show — but there was no camera. It was just me and him, standing around that table exhibiting dozens of Apple Watch prototypes that we were unable to touch, with a handful of Apple PR reps hanging around the sides of the room in silence, pecking away on their iPhones, waiting for a notice from one of their colleagues that it was time to escort one of us to our briefing. Oz was called first, thankfully. It gave me a few minutes of silence to gather my thoughts, and study the watches (albeit under glass), without distraction. I sometimes wonder who his briefing was with. (Phil Schiller, perhaps?)

I came away with the impression that Mehmet Oz was, despite his well-deserved medical renown, preternaturally vapid and preening, and, thus, to me, an incongruous figure. Simultaneously a brilliant mind in the field of thoracic surgery, and yet dumb as a rock in everyday human interaction. I spent the first few minutes with him wondering if I should introduce myself. I spent the last few glad I hadn’t, because he was so obviously a staggeringly uninteresting and uninterested man.

I would have much preferred spending those 10 minutes chatting with Dr. Nick. ★

Tuesday, 19 November 2024

Texas Education Board to Vote on Bible-Infused Lessons in Public Schools ★

Troy Closson, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

The optional curriculum, one of most sweeping efforts in recent years to bring a Christian perspective to more students, would test the limits of religious instruction in public education.

It could also become a model for other states and for the administration of President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has promised to champion the conservative Christian movement in his second presidential term. [...]

Religion makes up a relatively small portion of the overall content. But the lessons delve into Christianity far more often and in depth than they do into other faiths, religious scholars say and a review of the materials by The New York Times found. In kindergarten, for example, children would be taught that many religions value the Golden Rule, but the lessons would be focused on the Christian version, and introduce students to Jesus and his Sermon on the Mount.

The Times runs an excerpt from the curriculum, which reads:

The Sermon on the Mount included many different lessons. Some of these included do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy. Beyond the Sermon on the Mount, there are many rules included throughout the Bible. Jesus said that the Golden Rule sums up all of the important teachings from scripture. “So in everything, do unto others as you would have done unto you.”

“Do not judge others; do not seek revenge, or try to get even with someone; and give to the needy” — the very words that Donald Trump himself lives by.

See Also: Related coverage from The Onion: “Christian Right Lobbies to Overturn Second Law of Thermodynamics”.

Airport — A Typeface Revival ★

Lukas Schneider:

On 13 November 1961, the Oceanic building at London Airport opened to handle long-haul flight departure. In 1979, German publisher Ravensburger brought out a game designed to help children learn to count. Around Christmas 2023, I stumbled across a copy of that vintage game. The type on the box caught my eye, and that’s where this story began.

The letterforms resembled those of Helvetica. As the corners were soft, I initially thought it might be its Rounded version. However, the typeface featured a much larger x-height, the capitals were less wide, and the glyphs also had white bits in some places, yielding a highlight effect. I had never seen this design before. My first suspicion was that it might be a Letraset face, as this would have fitted in well with the release date of the game. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a match in a catalog by this manufacturer of rub-down type, so I contacted Florian Hardwig, who had often helped me with type research in the past. Florian was able to identify the mystery typeface. He found it in a catalog published in 1985 by Layout-Setzerei Stulle, a typesetting service in Stuttgart, Germany. Named Airport Spotlight, it’s a derivative of Airport, a typeface that Matthew Carter had designed in the early 1960s for signs at London Airport.

What a gift that Matthew Carter is still with us today. How’s this tidbit strike you, regarding the speed at which the world worked just decades ago:

In many regards, the adaptations made to Akzidenz echo the considerations made in the design of Helvetica. In an interview for Computer Arts, Carter comments: “[I]f you look at it today, you’d think was a rip-off of Helvetica. But we’d never seen Helvetica in 1961 in London, although it had been produced in Switzerland near Basle at the Haas foundry in 1957. Even if we had seen it, and wanted to have it typeset in London, we’d have had to get on a plane and fly to Basle and have it typeset there, because the British typesetting trade was so conservative that typefaces like that were simply unobtainable.”

Via Typographica.

Android Authority: ‘Google Is Transforming ChromeOS Into Android’ ★

Mishaal Rahman, reporting for Android Authority:

While both Android and ChromeOS have seen huge success in different markets, they’ve struggled to compete in one product category where they overlap: tablets. The high-end tablet market is dominated by the Apple iPad, and no matter what Google has tried, it has failed to change that. However, a source tells Android Authority that Google is working on a multi-year project to fully turn ChromeOS into Android, and the end result could be a platform that finally bests the iPad.

Probably not. Frankly it’s kind of weird that Android is a peer to iOS when it comes to phones, but not at all when it comes to tablets, even though iPadOS remains just a big-screen version of iOS. There are zillions of tablets out there that run Android, but they’re all crap and everyone knows it. “Flagship Android phones” are a thing; “Flagship Android tablets” are not. And iPads are a huge business for Apple, and the iPad is now solidly established as a piece of our cultural firmament. Everyone knows what an iPad is.

To better compete with the iPad as well as manage engineering resources more effectively, Google wants to unify its operating system efforts. Instead of merging Android and Chrome OS into a new operating system like rumors suggested in the past, however, a source told me that Google is instead working on fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android. While we don’t know what this means for the ChromeOS or Chromebook brands, we did hear that Google wants future “Chromebooks” to ship with the Android OS in the future. That’s why I believe that Google’s rumored new Pixel Laptop will run a new version of desktop Android as opposed to the ChromeOS that you’re likely familiar with.

So they’re not “merging” the two OSes as rumored, many times, in the past, but they’re “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android”. The only way that really makes a lick of sense is that they’re shitcanning ChromeOS and working to make Android not suck on devices other than phones, like laptops and tablets. Good luck with that, given that even Apple has struggled to make iOS/iPadOS a good laptop OS. OS platforms are just hard — hard to design, hard to engineer, hard to evolve. And Apple, for one, seems more committed than ever to the idea that MacOS and iPadOS remain very different platforms.

And, somehow, there’s no mention of Fuchsia in Rahman’s piece. Fuchsia is supposedly Google’s OS of the future, but which more and more is smelling like Google’s Copland or Pink — a sprawling “next-gen” OS project that collapses under the weight of its own ambition and lack of practical focus, spinning its wheels for years “in development” whilst the world moves on.

Inside ISIS’s Graphic Design Team ★

Jason Koebler, writing for 404 Media:

According to the filing, which was first reported by our friends at Court Watch, Said was an aspiring ISIS graphic designer who was working with ISIS’s second-in-command graphic designer. That person told Said that ISIS’s chief designer gave him the nickname The Nightmare because of the extensive notes and revisions that were required before any piece of propaganda he worked on was pushed out. The DOJ document suggested that The Nightmare himself had many revisions for Said’s graphic design work.

“You can call me the Dawlawi [ISIS] designer or you can call me as the brother used to before. He used to send his designs for me to modify and because of the many changes, he used to be scared of me so he would call me ‘the nightmare,’” a message from The Nightmare to Said published by the DOJ said. [...]

The FBI obtained what it says are notes on one propaganda image allegedly created by Said and which The Nightmare tore apart because it had so many design elements that it was not very legible or effective as a piece of propaganda, and suggested that Said should both simplify it and add blood effects to parts of it to better get the point across.

If the Trump 2.0 administration goes full fascist, I think I’ve found my role in the resistance.

Apple Devices May Learn to Ignore ‘Hey Siri’ Command From TV Ads ★

Filipe Espósito, writing at 9to5Mac:

Apple introduced the “Hey Siri” command with iOS 8 to let users easily interact with the virtual assistant without having to press any buttons. However, over the years, this has resulted in Siri being mistakenly triggered when the command is spoken on a TV ad. But Apple is finally working on a fix for this. [...]

The new AdBlocker framework is linked to ShazamKit, which is the API for apps to use Shazam — the song identification platform acquired by Apple in 2018. At the same time, the framework also links to the process responsible for managing the “Siri” and “Hey Siri” voice commands on Apple devices.

Code suggests that “AdBlocker” will download audio fingerprints from Apple’s servers and then use the Shazam API to match them against audio captured by the device’s microphones using the Hey Siri API. When certain audios match, the new framework will temporarily disable Siri’s trigger commands.

Clever clever.

Monday, 18 November 2024

The Talk Show: ‘Annoying Friendliness’ ★

Joanna Stern returns to the show to talk about our new best friends, AI chatbots, and I chime in with how the Voight-Kampff test got it all wrong.

Sunday, 17 November 2024

Netflix Claims 60 Million Households Streamed Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul Fight Friday Night, Straining Quality to Breaking Point for Many ★

Dominic Patten, reporting for Deadline Friday night:

Netflix’s much hyped and much delayed live fight tonight between Mike Tyson and Jake Paul is taking some hits even before the former heavyweight champion and the YouTuber turned boxer have climbed in the ring.

From nearly the start of the undercard bouts from AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the streamer has been freezing, losing sound and proving slow to reload. While not totally crashing as Netflix did when Luke Cage launched on the streamer in October 2016, the audio on the feed cut out over and over and the quality of the image was reduced to smeared pixels repeatedly.

We watched the whole fight card, and the stream started flaking out early. We had a couple minutes-long segments with what looked like 320p quality, and at other points, the audio completely dropped out for minutes-long stretches, as though the TV were muted. Some people in some places didn’t see any glitches, but it seems like most viewers experienced some.

I thought this boded poorly for Netflix’s upcoming Christmas Day NFL games (and gave them some shit about it on social media) but I vastly underestimated just how many people would watch the Tyson-Paul fight. I was thinking the Christmas NFL games would have more viewers than the fight, but it’s the other way around. Thanksgiving and Christmas NFL games get about 30 million viewers, but Netflix announced they had 60 million “households” for the fight, peaking at 65 million (and with 50 million watching the great women’s title fight that preceded the main event).

That said, the streaming glitches I saw Friday night began early in the evening, during the first fight on the card, a few hours before the main event. It didn’t feel to me to like Netflix’s live event streaming architecture could handle 30 million viewers, either.

It’s easy to forget just how amazing it is that traditional cable TV can deliver a live event to as many people as possible simultaneously. For context, the Super Bowl gets about 100–120 million viewers. Streaming is altogether different. Netflix didn’t fall down on this big fight night, but they stumbled.

Friday, 15 November 2024

‘Here’s Why I Decided to Buy “InfoWars”’ ★

Bryce P. Tetraeder, Global Tetrahedron CEO, in an op-ed for The Onion:

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society — values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

Make no mistake: This is a coup for our company and a well-deserved victory for multinational elites the world over.

What’s next for InfoWars remains a live issue. The excess funds initially allocated for the purchase will be reinvested into our philanthropic efforts that include business school scholarships for promising cult leaders, a charity that donates elections to at-risk third world dictators, and a new pro bono program pairing orphans with stable factory jobs at no cost to the factories.

Have I mentioned that under its new ownership, The Onion is once again in good old print, delivered by mail to annual subscribers? I signed up at the end of September, still looking forward to my first issue.

Thursday, 14 November 2024

Mike Tyson Slaps Jake Paul in Face During Weigh-In ★

The winner of tomorrow night’s fight gets to be Secretary of the Treasury in the second Trump administration.

The Onion Buys Alex Jones’s Infowars in Bankruptcy Auction ★

Brandy Zadrozny and Erik Ortiz, NBC News:

The Onion, the satirical news company that repeatedly spoofed conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, has won the bankruptcy auction for control over his media empire — most notably Infowars, the far-right, conspiracy-minded website that served as Jones’ primary online platform.

Jones announced the sale on X on Thursday morning.

“I just got word 15 minutes ago that my lawyers and folks met with the U.S. trustee over our bankruptcy this morning and they said they are shutting us down even without a court order this morning,” Jones said. [...]

The Onion plans to shutter Jones’ Infowars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale. About an hour and a half after the announcement of the sale, Infowars’ website was shut down.

If you’d told me, say, eight years ago, that in 2024 one of two things would happen: Infowars would buy The Onion or The Onion would buy Infowars, I don’t know which I’d have considered more likely. But I know which outcome I’d have rooted for. This is just delightful. I think what makes it so amazing is “The Onion Buys Infowars” feels like a perfect Onion headline.

Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Bill Atkinson Has Pancreatic Cancer ★

Bill Atkinson, on Facebook, “Request for Prayers”:

On October first, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Because of vascular involvement, surgery is not possible. I am taking weekly chemo treatments to shrink the tumor before surgical resection. I am tolerating the chemo pretty well, and I am in good spirits. Every day I make a point of getting out in the sun and walking with Cai and Poppy. [...]

At 73 years, I have already lived an amazing and wonderful life. I have loved and been loved, beginning with my remarkable mother who believed in me. With my work at Apple and General Magic I am grateful that I could make positive contributions to the lives of many millions of people, and even affect the course of human evolution.

But I want more quality time to share life and experiences with Cai and with my friends and family. My bucket list is not filled with places to travel, but instead with quality time with those I love and those who love me.

I am living my life filled with gratitude. Each day is a special gift to be unwrapped, enjoyed, and cherished.

A seminal figure in the history of Apple, and the Macintosh in particular. I’ve not yet had the pleasure of meeting him, but I’ve heard stories about Atkinson from several of his former colleagues. In addition to being a genius programmer, he’s by all accounts a kind and generous person. Everyone was (and remains to this day) in awe of his skills, but they remember him best for being a friend.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

The Verge’s Compilation of Tech Leaders Congratulating Donald Trump ★: More comprehensive, if less punchy, than my list last week:

Some Big Tech CEOs, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Disney’s Bob Iger, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew didn’t post a message for Trump. Netflix co-CEOs Greg Peters and Ted Sarandos also didn’t comment.

Disambiguating iPhone Model Names That Have the ‘S’ Suffix

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

Here’s the Apple support page listing the devices compatible with iOS 18. They’re listed in chronological order, oldest to newest, and the list begins with the iPhone XR and iPhone XS from 2018. But on this support page, Apple styles the “R” and “S” suffixes as small caps. Screenshot:

Screenshot from the linked Apple support page, showing the S in “iPhone XS” and R in “iPhone XR” styled with small caps.

Earlier today I linked to this Apple Newsroom post, regarding the new “Share Location” feature in Find My in iOS 18.2 beta 3. The Apple Newsroom post contains this sentence on iOS 18 compatibility:

Share Item Location is available now in most regions worldwide as part of the public beta of iOS 18.2, which will soon be available to all users as a free software update for iPhone Xs and later.

Is that the iPhone XS, styled with a lowercase s? Or are they referring to 2017’s iPhone X, and pluralizing it with the lowercase s? By nature of my work, I know that Apple’s internal style is never to pluralize a product name like “iPhone X” by adding an s; they would write something like “iPhone X models” or “iPhone X devices”. But to the casual reader, it’s ambiguous. I wound up double-checking on Apple’s aforelinked support page for iOS 18 device compatibility, just to be sure. And even there it’s only clear because a small caps R has a distinctive uppercase letterform.

Apple’s S suffix for certain iPhone models — 3GS, 4S, 5S, 6S, XS — has always been problematic in this regard. It’s a particular problem for publications with an all-caps headline style, such as posts here on Daring Fireball. This post from July 2008, shortly after the iPhone 3G came out, is headlined “iPhone 3Gs in Short Supply”, but when you see it styled on DF itself, it looks like “IPHONE 3GS IN SHORT SUPPLY”. At the time I wrote that, it wasn’t confusing at all — the iPhone 3G had only started shipping a few weeks prior, so the iPhone 3GS didn’t even exist yet (and with the 3G being the second-ever iPhone model, there wasn’t yet any history of Apple applying an S suffix to a model name). If I had it to do all over again, I’d have used an apostrophe (“iPhone 3G’s in Short Supply”) or just omitted pluralizing it in the first place (“iPhone 3G in Short Supply”).¹

But the letter S has a second ambiguity problem, in addition to pluralization: its upper and lowercase letterforms are distinguished only by size, not shape, in most roman fonts. That means if you try to distinguish it via the use of small caps, it’s to no avail, because a small caps uppercase S looks nearly (if not completely) identical to a lowercase s. And in fact, that’s exactly how Apple tends to style the S and R in “iPhone XS” and “iPhone XR”, as evidenced by the screenshot above showing the device compatibility list for iOS 18.

Viewing the HTML source on Apple Newsroom shows that that’s how they’ve styled “XS” in today’s post:

iPhone X<span class="all-small-caps">s</span> and later

The all-small-caps class is a simple one-rule style defined in the Apple Newsroom CSS:²

.all-small-caps {
    font-variant-caps:all-small-caps
}

Here’s where I think Apple could do better. In their HTML markup, they should use an uppercase S inside the span tag delineating the small caps. They should do this:

<span class="all-small-caps">S</span>

instead of this:

<span class="all-small-caps">s</span>

Both of those will render the s in small caps in the browser. But when a user copies and pastes the text from the rendered output in their browser, they’ll get the S or s in the same case it is in the HTML, because small-caps styling doesn’t carry across copy-and-pasting. Whether the original HTML markup uses an uppercase S or lowercase s inside the all-small-caps span, the rendered output users see in their web browser will be a small caps S. But what the user gets when copying and pasting will fall back to the actual case of the S in the HTML code.

Ideally, Apple wants us to see that S in small caps. But it’s inevitably going to fall back to simple upper or lowercase after copying and pasting, and in that situation (yes, I was tempted mightily to write case there), it’s clearly better to fall back on uppercase, giving copy-and-pasters the unambiguous “iPhone XS”.

Anyway, I’m glad Apple has seemingly abandoned these S-suffixed iPhone names. Next year when the XS and XR age out of support for iOS 19, we might be done writing about them in the present tense. ★

It’s a mistake, and a suggestion of low literacy, to erroneously use the apostrophe-s sequence to pluralize words or names where the proper way to spell the plural is to just add s. E.g., Apple employees are said to bleed six colors, not bleed six color’s. You surely know this. For chrissake you’re reading a footnote in a persnickety post regarding best practices in HTML markup for disambiguating product names in uncommon edge cases. But it’s not true that one should never form plurals using apostrophes. Per The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: “Use apostrophes for plurals formed from single letters: He received A’s and B’s on his report card. Mind your p’s and q’s.” My own style guide goes further, and endorses apostrophes for plurals of initialisms in headlines (because of DF’s all-caps headline style for short posts), to make clear that in a headline such as, say, “Truckers Are Still Buying CB’s”, that they’re buying two-way radios, not the television network. ↩︎
I, for one, do not care for Apple’s CSS coding style that omits the optional trailing semicolon from the last rule in a block. Makes me just a tad itchy when I see that.³ ↩︎︎
While I’m straying way out in the coding-style weeds here, let me also observe that I feel old and grumpy about the fact that Apple’s HTML markup on Newsroom posts wraps body text paragraphs in <div class="pagebody-copy"> tags, rather than simple semantic <p> tags. ↩︎︎

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

Also Now In Public Beta: Find My Enables Sharing Location of Lost Items With Third Parties, Including Airlines ★

Apple Newsroom:

Apple has introduced Share Item Location, a new iOS feature that helps users locate and recover misplaced items by easily and securely sharing the location of an AirTag or Find My network accessory with third parties such as airlines. Share Item Location is available now in most regions worldwide as part of the public beta of iOS 18.2, which will soon be available to all users as a free software update for iPhone Xs and later. Find My is built with privacy and safety at its core. The shared location will be disabled as soon as a user is reunited with their item, can be stopped by the owner at any time, and will automatically expire after seven days. [...]

Users can generate a Share Item Location link in the Find My app on their iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Recipients of a link will be able to view a website that shows a location of the item on an interactive map. The website will automatically update when a new location is available and will show a timestamp of the most recent update.

In the coming months, more than 15 airlines serving millions of people globally — including Aer Lingus, Air Canada, Air New Zealand, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Brussels Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Eurowings, Iberia, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Swiss International Air Lines, Turkish Airlines, United, Virgin Atlantic, and Vueling — will begin accepting Find My item locations as part of their customer service process for locating mishandled or delayed bags. More airlines will be added over time.

What a cool feature. Feels closer and closer to a no-brainer to keep an AirTag in each of your checked bags now.

iOS 18.2 Beta 3 Adds New ‘Require Screen On’ Toggle for Camera Control ★

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac:

iOS 18.2 beta 3 adds another new toggle for personalizing the iPhone 16’s Camera Control. Now, you can open the Camera app with a single press of the Camera Control even if your display is off.

If your iPhone 16’s display is off, the default behavior is that you press the Camera Control once to wake the screen and again to open the Camera app. This new toggle in iOS 18 gives you the ability to remove that first press.

If you go to the Settings app and choose “Display and Brightness,” you’ll see a new “Require Screen On” toggle at the bottom. This toggle is enabled by default. If you disable this toggle, however, a single press of the Camera Control will automatically open the Camera app regardless of whether or not your iPhone 16’s screen is on.

This was a significant gripe of mine in my iPhones 16 review, and this new setting is exactly what I was hoping for from Apple. I even agree that it’s probably a good idea for the “Require Screen On” setting to be on by default. I’m already running the iOS 18.2 betas on my personal phone for Apple Intelligence features, so I’ve disabled this new option already. I’m curious if it will result in any inadvertent Camera app launches, but I don’t think it will, for me. If anything, after two months of daily use of an iPhone 16 Pro, I feel like the recessed inset of the Camera Control button makes it a little too hard to click. I sort of wish it were raised, more like the Action and Side buttons. That Camera Control is effectively flush with the sides of the iPhone is protection enough — again, for me at least — against accidental presses.

Monday, 11 November 2024

John Geleynse Retires From Apple ★

John Geleynse, Apple’s longtime head of developer evangelism, on LinkedIn:

Doing anything for 25 years is a pretty big deal. Being a part of Apple for 25 years has been the privilege and experience of a lifetime.

My last day at Apple was exactly a week ago today. I’d always dreamed of being a part of Apple but never imagined it would be a reality. The most productive and exciting years of my career have been with Apple, and I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunity to meet and work with thousands of creative and passionate developers, designers, and students worldwide. [...]

There are no words to describe how grateful I am for the opportunity to work side-by-side with so many great people at Apple. Apple is an immensely special place — far greater than the sum of its parts. Together, we did a lot.

I heard about Geleynse’s retirement through the grapevine a month or two ago. I was hoping he’d post something like this publicly, so I could link to it. It’s a lovely departing message.

Turns out, in all the years I’ve been writing here, I’ve only mentioned Geleynse by name twice, and both times I was quoting what someone else had written. And those two posts were from 2007 and 2008 — a while ago, to say the least. That’s a shame, dare I say negligent on my part. In third-party developer circles, everyone knows John Geleynse. Most prominently, his role as co-host (with Shaan Pruden) and I think effectively co-chief of the Apple Design Awards. But the ADAs are a once-per-year award show. Year-round, year after year, platform after platform, Geleynse has been shaping, guiding, and defining what it means to be a third-party developer for Apple platforms. The point of winning an ADA isn’t to win an ADA; it’s to reward making a great app that moves the state of the art forward. That’s what Geleynse spent his career trying to do. He’s just incredibly well-liked and well-respected.

But, like a typical “bleed six colors” Apple employee, I think Geleynse going all these years operating mostly behind the scenes, with his own name out of the story, taking no personal credit, is just the way he wanted it. He’s going to be missed — things just won’t be the same — both inside Apple, and out.

Testing the New Ultrawide Mac Virtual Display Option in VisionOS 2.2 ★

MacRumors:

With the wide display option, there’s enough screen real estate to use four apps at once without compromising on window size. Ultrawide bumps up the available space even more, and it’s almost too much display space.

Using the ultrawide setting is like having multiple curved Mac displays in front of you to handle your Mac apps, and then you can also add in visionOS apps to better utilize the virtual space around you. The larger screen sizes for the Mac do improve productivity because there’s so much more space to work with.

Note that you still can’t use multiple Mac windows when mirroring your Mac display to your Vision Pro, but the wide and ultrawide provide so much space that it’s essentially the same function. Apple says that the ultrawide mode is equivalent to using two 4K monitors side by side.

If this suits your physical workspace (like, say, if you live and work in a studio apartment) or travel needs, it comes close to justifying the cost of a Vision Pro by itself. A single Studio Display costs $1,600 (without a nicer stand, without the nicer nano-texture coating).

Sunday, 10 November 2024

1Password: The Infinite Loop of Security ★

My thanks to 1Password — which, earlier this year, acquired frequent DF sponsor Kolide — for sponsoring last week at DF. The 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that “the human element” (accidental breaches caused by human error, or victimization in phishing attacks and the like) was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials. The 2024 DBIR found that “use of stolen credentials” is the number one initial action during a breach, and that credentials are the number one way attackers gain access in non-error, non-misuse breaches, followed by phishing and vulnerability exploits. This needs to change, and the 2024 DBIR offers a clear look at where we’re falling short and where we go from here. To get more insights about the report and its implications for security, read the full post on 1Password’s blog.

The Talk Show: ‘Holiday Party 2024’ With Special Guest Merlin Mann ★

This again. Jiminy. Well, once more, let’s talk around another election, and try, by doing so, to maybe express something about it.

How It Went

Friday, 8 November 2024

My mom died at the end of June this year.

I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim: months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.

Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity, courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but they laid ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No suffering. The whole dreadful grind of battling cancer never came. It’s such a cliché but clichés are often true: given what she faced, it was a blessing she died how and when she did. She never wanted to suffer and she didn’t. I loved her and I miss her.

Like I said, it was all OK, in the end — the way and how and when my mom died.

But my dad. My dad is 86, in exceptional good health, and he remains sharp. Until recently he not only played golf but walked the course, carrying his own clubs. He stopped playing golf last year, because — and I realized this only after my mom was hospitalized in May — he’d more and more been shouldering all of the responsibilities of daily life for the both of them. Even just nine holes of golf takes a few hours, and he didn’t want to leave her alone for that long a stretch of time, so he stopped playing. He still walks a mile or more a day, weather permitting. They were married 52 years and spent only a handful of nights apart in that entire span. They were in some ways an opposites-attract couple, but they were inseparable. They were good together. After accepting her cancer diagnosis, my mom was ready, I think, even for something as sudden as what happened to her at the end. My dad was not.

But he’s an optimist at heart. You’d like him. I, of course, don’t know who you are, dear reader, but I know you’d like my dad, Bob Gruber, because everyone likes Bob Gruber. He can tell a good joke and he loves to tell them. There’s a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that I was reminded of, just the other day, from of all things a garbage can: “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” I don’t share Lincoln’s there’s-something-to-like-about-everyone optimism about our fellow men, but my dad does.

He’s been doing good, I think, these months since her passing. I talk to him almost every day. He’s naturally outgoing and still goes out. He’s got friends — which fact alone can be rare for an 86-year-old — and he sees them regularly. He attends mass frequently and takes tremendous solace in his faith. He misses my mom, his wife, desperately, but he puts on a good face. He gets sad and he admits he gets sad. But the very last thing he wants is for anyone, especially me or my sister, to worry about or even feel sorry for him. I’m like that. I get it. You often hear about old men who just shut down and fade away, rather quickly, after their wives die. My dad’s not shutting down.

I thought of my dad this week when I watched Harrison Ford’s gravelly endorsement of Kamala Harris, which he began thus: “Look, I’ve been voting for 64 years. Never really wanted to talk about it very much.” My dad’s politics are like that. His religion is too. Strong beliefs that he doesn’t feel the need to broadcast or proselytize — and deep suspicion, bordering on contempt, regarding those who do. My dad is old and white and lives in a suburb in a red Pennsylvania county, but he is a lifelong Democrat. He can’t abide Fox News and never understood his age-group peers who succumbed to Rush Limbaugh’s daily siren call. His entire life he’s seen the Democrats as the party of and for the people. The party for working men and women. The party of equality and justice and minding your own goddamn business what people do in their private lives. He votes every election, even the odd years, when the only office on the ballot might be the borough tax collector or members of the school board. He rightly sees voting as a citizen’s civic duty. My dad is the most honest and trustworthy person I’ve ever known, or even imagined. If they ever somehow met, my dad and Joe Biden would become fast friends. They share a worldview, and grew up at the same time, in similar places, from similar means. They even both love trains. (My dad, though, thought Biden was too old to run again. “I know that walk,” he told me early this year, regarding Biden’s stiffening gait. He thought it was good, and noble, when Biden dropped out.) He despises Donald Trump and sees right through him.

So, when my dad called me Tuesday morning, I thought it would be the election on his mind. It was all that was on my mind, that’s for sure. He had, in fact, just come back from voting, but it was something else. His voice was chipper, upbeat, but I could tell it wasn’t a good story. I know him too well.

Turns out, he had gone out to eat, by himself, Monday evening. In fact, at the very same restaurant where he and my mom ate their last meal together. He ate, drove home, and once home went to wash his hands before going to bed. That’s when he noticed his wedding band was missing from his finger.

It was lost.

He looked around to no avail, and went to bed without it. In the morning light, he retraced his steps. He felt certain he had it on while at the restaurant — not because he took any note of it while dining, but because he knows he’d have noticed its absence. If you wear a ring every day on the same finger, you know how true that is. He almost never took that ring off.

At some point when I was a little kid, my dad told me he had never once removed his ring since my mom put it on his finger at their wedding, the year before I was born. My mom, I knew, took hers on and off all the time. In fact she often wore other rings in place of her actual wedding band, because she found them more comfortable, and she placed little sentimental value on the ring from her actual ceremony. I asked my dad that day about his, and he told me he simply had never taken it off. I found that to be amazing. From my childhood perspective, he’d worn that ring nonstop for a lifetime. He broke that streak eventually, for some small reason, and it wasn’t a big deal to him, the never-having-taken-it-off thing. But I knew from that time I asked him about it as a child, that the ring itself was deeply important to him, in a way that my mom didn’t feel about hers. Some people imbue meaning and sentimental importance to certain objects. My dad saw his wedding ring like that. It was a sacred token. And now he’d lost it.

Through my youth — his 30s and 40s and early 50s — my dad always looked how I’d describe as “of average build”. Neither thin nor heavy. Strong but not muscled. He looked like the sort of man who in his youth played third base, and batted near the top of the order, which he did. A former athlete who could still hit the living shit out of a golf ball. In his middle age, he gained a bit of a paunch. (It happens, I now know.) But in the last few years he’s lost quite a bit of weight. He’s downright bony now, in an old man way. His old pants (and nearly all his pants are old — he’s 86) need to be cinched with a belt or they’d fall right off him. His fingers too, have gotten bony. So his ring had gotten loose. He’d offhandedly mentioned that fact to me a few months ago even, telling me he needed to be careful whenever his hands might get wet.

After waking Tuesday morning, he searched everywhere he could think it might be. The kitchen. The bathroom. The shower. The sink. The other sink. He took the couch cushions off. He looked in his car. He went back in the house and searched everywhere all over again. He took a break to vote, came home, and went back out and searched the car again, this time with a flashlight. To no avail. It’s a sick feeling after you’ve lost something of value, when you start losing count of how many times you’ve looked for it in the exact same places you’ve already checked. You can’t stop looking, but can’t think of new places to search.

He called the restaurant, but they weren’t yet open, so he left a message, leaving his name and number in case anyone had found a simple well-worn gold wedding band — and if no one had, well, maybe could they keep an eye out for it. He called me after he left that message. He wasn’t forlorn. He laughed even. That’s how he is. That’s how I am. That’s how we are. I’m his boy, as he still sometimes reminds me. But I know what that ring meant to him.

And my mom had just died so recently. It has only been a few months. The seasons have only changed once since we buried her.

Fuck.

It was a bad start to a day that I began, like any keen political junkie, with a nervous feeling. I’m not superstitious but a bad omen is a bad omen. You want every little thing to break right on a high-stress big day, and Election Day, for us, had begun with a small heartbreak. I told my wife about my dad’s ring and she almost burst into tears. She loves him so much. “He just lost your mom”, she said.

You know how the rest of Election Day went. My wife and I voted. We both like the ceremony of voting in-person on Election Day. It helps that we live in a neighborhood with a vibrant civil infrastructure, with no-wait polling places no more than a block or two away from any residence. We were both feeling good.

But then what? I was reminded, once again, that I never know what to do with myself on Election Day in a presidential election. No information or results can be gleaned until polling places start closing in early states at 7pm ET. What do you do until then? It seemed pointless for me to write anything further about the election, but equally futile to think I could concentrate on anything else. Expounding upon Kottke’s treatise on the art of hypertext writing was a good distraction. I got to write about something I care about, and because the inspiration was the NYT editorial board’s receipts-packed 110-word admonition to end the Trump era, my effort felt at least tangentially related to the election that was then (and alas, remains now) front of mind for me. I could focus on that, and I didn’t finish it until just before 7:00pm. Perfect.

That’s Kornacki time. Steve Kornacki’s data-driven, map-based analysis has been the heart and soul of MSNBC’s presidential election night coverage for all three Trump elections: 2016, 2020, and now 2024. I honestly don’t remember how I watched election results before Kornacki. I know I’ve been watching election night results on TV since at least 1992. As best I can recall, before 2016, I’d flip around between CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks. I basically just “watched the news on TV”, not on any particular channel. But starting in 2016, we just watch Kornacki. We put on MSNBC and we don’t flip. The desk chatter amongst commentators and panelists that consumes the time between Kornacki updates is background noise. But what Kornacki does is genius. Maybe the other networks have caught up and do something similar now. I don’t know, because I no longer flip.

The way it works is that every news operation has a “decision desk”. The decision desk staffers are off-screen analysts, not on-air talent. They call state-by-state results only with absolute certainty. That absolute certainty can and usually does come before every single vote in a state has been counted, but comes after the likely winner is ascertainable beyond a reasonable doubt. The decision desks make their calls not when the writing appears on the wall, but when the paint has started to dry.

They weren’t always so fastidious, because nerve-rackingly close results in American presidential elections used to be the exception, not the norm. But after the contentious and almost impossibly close election of 2000, when, on election night, multiple networks — including Fox News — had projected Al Gore the winner early in the evening, based on exit polls rather than tabulated votes, every such major decision desk has become quite rigorous about this, regardless of the political bent of the network or publication. Rigorous to the point of almost entirely avoiding controversy. We can see that even now, on Friday 8 November, as I write this. At the moment, none of the major decision desks have yet called Arizona or Nevada, despite it being a near-certainty Trump won both. The only exception I can recall was four years ago, when Fox News called Arizona for Biden at midnight and the AP followed a few hours later. Biden did in fact win Arizona, but when Fox and the AP called it for him, with 80 percent of the state’s ballots counted, Biden was ahead by a seemingly comfortable 9 percent. By the time all ballots had been counted, days later, the margin had closed to a whisker-thin 0.3 percent. They were correct, but by their own standards of rigor were mistaken to call it when they did. It’s an interesting sign of how independent the Fox News decision desk is, though, that when they got reckless, it was in Biden’s direction.

What Steve Kornacki does at MSNBC is make de facto calls without making actual calls. Or better put, he presents real-time data and context that allows you, the attentive viewer, to start making calls long before the decision desks reach their standards of absolute certainty. “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” goes the Bob Dylan line. Steve Kornacki isn’t the weatherman. He’s our finger in the air.

What he does is find telltale counties in important states. A suburb of Atlanta. A suburb of Charlotte. A suburb of Philadelphia. With, say, half the vote counted, he might show that Harris is winning 75-25 in that county. That’s a solidly blue county. A 50-point margin is, you know, good. But then comes the context. That same county, let’s say, went 80-20 for Biden in 2020, and went 75-25 for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now that 75-25 margin for Harris doesn’t look good. It looks like 2016, not like 2020. Or go the other way. Kornacki finds small rural counties of note. Some red county Trump was certain to win, but which he was winning this year by margins that looked like those in 2016, not 2020.

It’s quite remarkable, Kornacki’s gift. He presents the story, the explanation of how the election results are going, without ever saying what exactly it is he is explaining. He shows you just the right trees to give you a sense of the entire forest. He never says “It looks like Trump is going to win North Carolina.” He simply presents facts, cold hard facts, that, if you consider them, explain why it looks like Trump is going to win North Carolina. They are conclusions left for you, the viewer, to draw. It’s incredibly disciplined. But he never ever gets ahead of the actual NBC News decision desk. He doesn’t have to. The way he does what he does, he can’t be wrong. If Kornacki paints a picture of live data and historical results that indicate that Trump is heading toward a win in, say, Georgia, hours before any official decision desk call is made, that’s because the data available up to that point just factually shows that Trump is on a path to win Georgia. And if something were to happen with the remaining votes that change that path, he’ll simply present that new data as it comes in, later in the evening.

Closely watching Kornacki didn’t mean I knew Trump was going to win early in the evening. But it meant I knew it sure looked like he was going to. I was concerned when Florida’s results came in, shortly after their polls closed at 8pm. (Say what you will about their debacle in 2000, but in the aftermath, Florida got its shit together and now tabulates the entirety of their statewide vote with remarkable alacrity and promptness.) I of course had no expectation that Harris might win Florida, but she lost by 13 points. Trump only won Florida four years ago by 3 points. That swing alone was an ominous early sign of the nationwide trend. That’s when the pit formed in my stomach. Uh-oh.

I don’t flip channels but I do of course watch with my phone in hand. The New York Times’s infamous “needle” lurched sickeningly rightward early. I stopped looking at it, but not because I thought it was mistaken. Because I knew it was probably correct. By 10pm or so, it seemed obvious that Harris’s only plausible path to victory was for three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — to buck the nationwide trend of red counties getting redder, and blue counties getting slightly less blue. There was reason for hope, but not much. It was like “Tom Brady could lead the Patriots to a comeback in the Super Bowl even though they’re down 28-3 in the third quarter” hope. That happened, but that’s not how 28-3 football games tend to go. That’s not how elections tend to go. And it’s not how this one went. At 11:20pm, my friend Taegan Goddard wrote this lede in a post at Political Wire: “Donald Trump is now very likely to win re-election. He has the edge in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all states Kamala Harris needs to win.” I wasn’t yet at the point where I’d have put that into such stark words, but I knew they were true. So it goes.

I watched MSNBC for another hour, but only with resignation, not hope. I watched a Harris spokesman take the podium at her stage at Howard University and tell the nation she wouldn’t be speaking until Wednesday — just like 2016. I posted one brief item here, commenting only, “Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.”

I woke early on Wednesday, at least by my night owl standards. A gut punch is not a sleep aid. My dad called, just after 9:30am. He seldom calls that early, knowing my sleep habits. I hadn’t stopped feeling heartsick about his ring. His voice though, was excited. He’d gone to mass that morning, driven home, and parked in front of his house. (Still hard for me not to call it their house.) Same exact spot where he’d parked the night he lost the ring. It’s a one-way street, and in front of his house, cars park on the left. He opened the car door and thought to look down, just in case. There it was. His ring. In the street, between his car and the curb, nestled amidst some dry leaves. It must have fallen off his finger as he was opening the car door that night, and the leaves perhaps deadened any clink it might have made hitting the ground. If that parking spot hadn’t been open again, he wouldn’t have found it then and there. If it had rained, it would have washed away.

He said, “John, when I picked that ring up, I kissed it. 52 years I’ve had this ring on my finger. I thanked St. Anthony, and I thanked your mother. I think she found it for me.”

Given the circumstances when I went to bed Tuesday night, it was no surprise I was welling up with tears come the morning. But I’d never have expected they’d be tears of joy, with a sense of hope — however diminished — and abiding love in my heart. ★

It Doesn’t End

Friday, 8 November 2024

Hunter S. Thompson, writing in September 1972, a little over one month ahead of Nixon’s landslide reelection:

The polls also indicate that Nixon will get a comfortable majority of the Youth Vote. And that he might carry all fifty states.

Well … maybe so. This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves: finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government”, is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.

McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem almost frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for.

Jesus! Where will it end?

If every damn word of that doesn’t ring true to you today, you’re deaf. I have quoted this same passage once before, in the opposite context (or at least the opposite mood) — the day after Barack Obama’s election victory 16 years ago. I wrote then:

It ends here, today.

I love this country.

That first sentence sounds hopelessly naive today. I don’t blame my younger self for having written it though. That 2008 Obama win was euphoric. It remains our nation’s high-water mark. Until that day there remained large swaths not merely of the American electorate as a whole, but of Democrats and liberals, who believed they’d never live to see this nation elect a black man as president. But that happened. Barack Obama was elected, then reelected four years later, and left office and remains today a popular leader. Obama’s win in 2008 (365-173) was far larger than Trump’s win this year (312-226), measured either by Electoral College results or the popular vote. Obama’s 2012 reelection against Mitt Romney (332-206) was a larger win than Trump’s now.

The lesson is that it never ends.

But my god, look at the results Thompson was writing about in 1972. Richard Nixon won the Electoral College 520-17 and the popular vote by 23 percent. He won 49 of 50 states. “Jesus!” indeed. This now is not that. This is bad and dangerous and dark, but while Trump’s win was brutally clear, it was still a very close, deeply divided election. Barack Obama ran in 2008 opposing gay marriage. The Democrat. That was only 16 years ago. The iPhone was already out. Progress hasn’t stopped, but it’s never easy, and never without backlash.

It doesn’t end. Keep the faith. ★

I Wonder

Thursday, 7 November 2024

Jeff Bezos, yesterday at 10:29am on X:

Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.

Mark Zuckerberg, yesterday on Threads (natch) at 11:50am:

Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory. We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.

Sundar Pichai, yesterday on X at 12:02pm:

Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory. We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone.

Satya Nadella, yesterday on X at 12:36pm:

Congratulations President Trump, we’re looking forward to engaging with you and your administration to drive innovation forward that creates new growth and opportunity for the United States and the world.

Tim Cook, yesterday on X at 1:14pm:

Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity.

I wonder how much Cook dithered over that cheerful-looking exclamation mark. I hope he regrets it. I wonder whether the latter four knowingly made the error of addressing former president and president-elect Trump as “President Trump”. Our nation only has one president at a time, and that president remains Joe Biden. I wonder how much it stings to be reminded that all the money in the world cannot buy dignity. I wonder too, what taste Cheetos-dusted 78-year-old testicles leave in one’s mouth. Whatever the flavor, I hope it lingers. ★

Wednesday, 6 November 2024

The Brutal Clarity of This Result ★

Taegan Goddard, Political Wire:

After last night, it became clear it was a mistake to dismiss Trump’s true political strength. He will win the 2024 election with at least 51% of the popular vote.

His win will not be the result of a constitutional quirk. It was not even the result of a bad campaign by Kamala Harris. His victory was so broad based I’m not sure any Democrat could have beaten him last night.

There’s a brutal clarity in this result.

The majority of Americans are not concerned with Trump’s blatant racism or sexism. They are not concerned with his vows of retribution on his political enemies. They are not concerned with warnings of “fascism” by his former top aides. They are not concerned with his extensive criminal and fraudulent behavior.

If there’s a takeaway from this election, it’s that this is who we are.

Not all of us, to be sure. But it makes clear what the rest of us are up against.

I take some small solace at the moment in Trump’s victory being the clear democratic result. Republicans just fucking won. No mistakes on Harris’s side. There’s no Comey letter. No hanging chads. No margin within the range of woulda-coulda-shoulda recriminations. Just a clear electoral result.

I realized this year — or perhaps over the last four years — that for me, belief in the merits of democracy is quasi-religious. It’s more than a philosophy. It’s a fundamental belief. I have faith in democracy, and part of that is accepting the results of any fair and free election as the will of the electorate — similar, I think, to how actually religious people have faith that unspeakable tragedies can somehow be the will of a just and righteous deity. Through that prism, and with the genuine shock of 2016 giving me a brace, I can accept this. But because of that prism, I will never forgive or forget Trump’s shameful desecration of our democratic ideals in 2020. His winning in 2016 and again now are awful events. But his attempt to overturn the 2020 election — ham-fisted, idiotic, and failed though it thankfully was — was and will always be worse.

‘In Defeat: Defiance’ ★

Bill Kristol, at The Bulwark:

The American people have made a disastrous choice. And they have done so decisively, and with their eyes wide open.

Donald J. Trump will be our next president, elected with a majority of the popular vote, likely winning both more votes and more states than he did in his two previous elections. After everything — after his chaotic presidency, after January 6th, after the last year in which the mask was increasingly off, and no attempt was made to hide the extremism of the agenda or the ugliness of the appeal — the American people liked what they saw. At a minimum, they were willing to accept what they saw.

And Trump was running against a competent candidate who ran a good campaign to the center and bested him in a debate, with a strong economy. Yet Trump prevailed, pulling off one of the most remarkable comebacks in American political history. Trump boasted last night, “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” and he’s not altogether wrong. [...]

So: We can lament our situation. We can analyze how we got here. We can try to learn lessons from what has happened. We have to do all these things.

But we can’t only do those things. As Churchill put it: “In Defeat: Defiance.” We’ll have to keep our nerve and our principles against all the pressure to abandon them. We’ll have to fight politically and to resist lawfully. We’ll have to do our best to limit the damage from Trump. And we’ll have to lay the groundwork for future recovery.

To do all this, we’ll have to constitute a strong opposition and a loyal opposition, loyal to the Declaration and the Constitution, loyal to the past achievements and future promise of this nation, loyal to what America has been and should be.

‘Trump Has Won, but Democracy Is Not Over’ ★

Tom Nichols, for The Atlantic:

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states — at least those in the union that will still care about democracy — have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now — not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. [...]

Trump’s victory is a grim day for the United States and for democracies around the world. You have every right to be appalled, saddened, shocked, and frightened. Soon, however, you should dust yourself off, square your shoulders, and take a deep breath. Americans who care about democracy have work to do.

I wrote last night, “Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.” Referring, of course, to watching the results come in on election night in 2016. Now the day after, I still sense some of the same similarities to 2016, but I more feel the differences. I was braced for this result, this time. I wasn’t in 2016. Trump winning in 2016 was like a trapdoor we didn’t even know existed opening suddenly under our feet. But once the unimaginable happens, it’s no longer unimaginable that it might happen again. I was optimistic about this election. But polls are polls, and I knew my optimism was based on some degree of faith that the polls were wrong. I still think, now, that there were good reasons to suspect the polls might be underestimating Harris’s and down-ticket Democrats’ chances. But after 2016, I knew the polls showing Trump’s resiliency could be right.

Trump’s first term in office was disastrous on numerous fronts, and of the few things I feel certain about right now, one of them is that his second will be worse. This is going to be bad. But we shouldn’t be concussed like we were in 2016. This was not unimaginable. We knew this might be the result. And we know how we got through it last time: by going through it, with eyes open, resistance strong, and, as Nichols exhorts, shoulders squared. Truth and justice are the American way. The fight goes on.

Overnight Status Check ★

Josh Marshall, signing off for the night:

If Harris loses, that is obviously a crushing result. There’s no way around that. It’s different from 2016 in that it’s not a shock. We all knew or should have known this was a very possible result. The polls and models were about as close to 50-50 as you can get. A number were literally 50-50. But there’s another dimension of the story, assuming Trump does win. And that’s this: everyone knows who Donald Trump is. He was already President once. We know what that was like. Paradoxically Kamala Harris and he both did a pretty good job reminding us who he was over the last month. So it’s not like 2016 when you could say people didn’t know what they were getting. We know who he is. If he wins, which now looks probable though not certain, that’s a very sobering reality.

Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.

Tuesday, 5 November 2024

Apple News Offers an Election Day Live Activity ★

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

It’s Election Day in the U.S., which means you’re likely glued to the latest news about which presidential candidate is currently in the lead. To help with this, Apple has released a Live Activities widget within its Apple News app that will offer real-time election updates directly on your iPhone or iPad’s Home Screen and Lock Screen. [...]

To use the Apple News Live Activity in the U.S., you’ll need to first launch the News app and then tap on the banner at the top of the page offering live updates. After doing so, you’ll get a message saying “Live Activity Scheduled,” which notes that when the event starts, you’ll begin to receive real-time updates on both your Home Screen and Lock Screen.

On Apple Watch and in the iPhone’s Dynamic Island, it shows the Electoral College results for the presidential election; on the Home and Lock screens, it adds the results for the Senate and House of Representatives.

Monday, 4 November 2024

‘Vote to End the Trump Era’ ★

The New York Times editorial board, making deft use of good old-fashioned hypertext, has published a powerful endorsement on the eve of the election that covers so much ground, yet fits entirely in a single concise paragraph. In its entirety:

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

Harrison Ford Endorses Kamala Harris ★

Harrison Ford:

The truth is this. Kamala Harris will protect your right to disagree with her. About policies, or ideas. And then, as we have done for centuries, we’ll debate them. We’ll work on them together. And we’ll move forward. The other guy? He demands unquestioning loyalty. Says he wants revenge.

I’m Harrison Ford, I’ve got one vote, same as everyone else — and I’m going to use it to move forward. I’m going to vote for Kamala Harris.

Ford’s message is a powerful framing of the authoritarian, anti-democracy dynamic in this election. Short, gruff, and to the point. Worth sharing to anyone you think might still be on the fence.

See Also: Same video, on X, if that’s easier for you to share.

Nilay Patel: ‘A Vote for Donald Trump Is a Vote for School Shootings and Measles’ ★

Nilay Patel, endorsing Kamala Harris at The Verge:

But look beyond the locked-in message discipline to her approach to campaigning, and it is clear Harris is deeply, meaningfully committed to solving collective action problems. She has assembled a politically diverse group of people to support her that range from AOC to Liz Cheney to Mark Cuban, and most of her claims about how she’ll run the country differently than Biden come down to putting Republicans in her Cabinet and reaching across the aisle more. She has, for better or worse, made approaches to the crypto community while championing restrictions on price gouging and regulations on banks. She had antimonopoly Senator Elizabeth Warren onstage at the Democratic National Convention while having Google antitrust defense lawyer Karen Dunn serve as her debate advisor.

You might not agree with some of the depressingly averaged-out policy positions produced by this unnervingly big tent. You might have some serious problems with, say, her proximity to the current administration and its approach to the war in Gaza. But this is what happens when the other party in our two-party system can only generate policy ideas that amount to AI-generated blood libel and RETVRN memes on X. Trump and the MAGA movement have stripped the Republican Party of the ability to govern democratically, so that process has moved inside the Harris coalition.

In many ways, the ecstatic reaction to Harris is simply a reflection of the fact that she is so clearly trying. She is trying to govern America the way it’s designed to be governed, with consensus and conversation and effort. With data and accountability, ideas and persuasion. Legislatures and courts are not deterministic systems with predictable outputs based on a set of inputs — you have to guide the process of lawmaking all the way to the outcomes, over and over again, each time, and Harris seems not only aware of that reality but energized by it. More than anything, that is the change a Harris administration will bring to a country exhausted by decades of fights about whether government can or should do anything at all.

I still see some friends on the left who are uneasy with Liz Cheney’s full-throated endorsement of Harris. And even more so by her father’s. Back in September, when Liz Cheney declared her endorsement of Harris, I wrote:

But (lowercase ‘d’) democratic politics ought to be viewed very much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are in psychology. Some things matter more than others. And nothing — not climate change or the environment, not reproductive rights, and certainly not fucking tax rates — nothing matters more than support for democracy itself and the rule of law. The only way we’re going to get those other things right — which are really, really important — is through democratic governance and the rule of law.

Everyone who supports democracy, who understands the stakes, who sees who Trump is with clear eyes, is on one side in this election. That side is with Kamala Harris. It certainly makes for some strange bedfellows on the sort of policy disagreements most U.S. elections are waged over. It is terrifying and depressing that so many Americans are seemingly on the other side. But make no mistake, those are the stakes.

The Message That Works: the Republicans Who Know Trump Best Refuse to Endorse Him ★

Bill Kristol, writing last month for The Bulwark:

The Democratic polling and messaging firm Blueprint recently tested the effectiveness of several closing messages for the Harris campaign. (This was before Kelly’s new remarks.) Here’s one message the group put before voters:

Donald Trump doesn’t have the character it takes to be president. He’s erratic and can’t control himself. He denied the results of an election just because he lost and is a threat to the fundamental American principle of democracy. He instigated a riot at the Capitol that left three police officers dead.

This general (and true) statement barely moved the needle on voters’ preferences. It presumably simply sounds like a reiteration of things voters have heard before.

What did move the needle was this message:

Nearly half of Donald Trump’s Cabinet have refused to endorse him. When Trump learned during the Capitol riot that his supporters were threatening to kill his own vice president, he said ‘so what?’ and refused to do anything to assure the vice president was safe. Republican governors, senators, and House members have all said the same thing: We can’t give Trump another four years as president.

As soon as the message turned from an abstract argument against Trump into an unambiguous case that Trump’s own former allies were making against him, it became the single most persuasive line tested by Blueprint. It was stronger even than abortion rights and Social Security. In other words, hearing about Trump’s unfitness from people who worked with him, and from Republicans one would expect to defend him, seems to make a difference.

Sunday, 3 November 2024

Nomorobo ★

My thanks to Nomorobo for sponsoring this week at DF. It’s perfect timing, especially if, like me, you live in an election swing state. The one thing all voters (and, now that I think about it, surely non-voters alike) agree on is annoyance at political robocalls and robotexts.

While every candidate, campaign, PAC, and political party uses robocalls and texts, Nomorobo is tracking them and gives you control over who you want to hear from, and who you don’t.

Use Nomorobo’s powerful but very easy-to-use tools to identify, block, and report the calls and texts you don’t want to receive anymore, and they’ll handle the rest. Nomorobo integrates with iOS’s built-in functionality for filtering calls and text messages. I’ve been a paying customer of Nomorobo since 2017. My iPhone doesn’t even ring when a call comes in from a known robocaller. It’s a great app and it really works. If you wish you had better options for screening out robocalls and texts, try Nomorobo.

Iowa Poll From ‘Best Pollster In Politics’: Kamala Harris Ahead 47-44 ★

The Des Moines Register:

Kamala Harris now leads Donald Trump in Iowa — a startling reversal for Democrats and Republicans who have all but written off the state’s presidential contest as a certain Trump victory.

A new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows Vice President Harris leading former President Trump 47% to 44% among likely voters just days before a high-stakes election that appears deadlocked in key battleground states. The results follow a September Iowa Poll that showed Trump with a 4-point lead over Harris and a June Iowa Poll showing him with an 18-point lead over Democratic President Joe Biden, who was the presumed Democratic nominee at the time.

“It’s hard for anybody to say they saw this coming,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co. “She has clearly leaped into a leading position.” [...]

The poll shows that women — particularly those who are older or who are politically independent — are driving the late shift toward Harris.

No poll guarantees anything, of course, but this one stands out. If it holds up, Harris is on her way to a clear victory. It also explains Harris’s increasingly sunny demeanor down the stretch and Trump’s increasingly erratic and desperate antics, like dressing up as a garbage man last week. Selzer is widely regarded as one of the best pollsters in America, if not the best. Her eve-of-election 2016 Iowa poll was an outlier, predicting Trump would beat Hillary Clinton by 7 points; Trump won Iowa by 9 points that year. In 2020, Selzer’s closing poll had Trump ahead of Biden by 7; he won the state by 8.

The explanation for Harris’s surprise strength in Iowa — that women have had enough of Trump and his shithead revanchist misogynist party — holds water. If this poll is wrong, I still like Harris’s chances. If this poll is right, it’s in the bag for Harris.

Iowa doesn’t get counted as a “swing state”, perhaps because Trump won it by such significant margins in 2016 and 2020, but in recent elections has swung back and forth by large margins:

2020: 🟥 Trump by 8.2
2016: 🟥 Trump by 9.5
2012: 🟦 Obama by 5.8
2008: 🟦 Obama by 9.5
2004: 🟥 W. by 0.7
2000: 🟦 Gore by 0.3
1996: 🟦 Clinton by 10.4
1992: 🟦 Clinton by 6.0

And if you want to go back to what’s effectively now electoral pre-history, Mike Dukakis won Iowa by 10.2 points in 1988.

Keep the faith. Be sure to vote.

Trump, His Remaining Shreds of Both Dignity and Sanity Slipping Away in the Face of Impending Loss, Tells Rally He ‘Shouldn’t Have Left’ White House in 2020 ★

The New York Times:

Reflecting on the state of border security at the end of his tenure, Mr. Trump said he regretted ever leaving office.

“I shouldn’t have left, I mean, honestly,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “we did so well, we had such a great — ” and then cut himself off. He then immediately noted “so now, every polling booth has hundreds of lawyers standing there.”

I wish he wouldn’t have left the White House on his own (which he did like the complete turd that he is, refusing to attend his successor’s inauguration). Biden was prepared for that, and we’d have all gotten to enjoy seeing him marched out by the military after watching Biden take the oath of office.

No Minced Words From Senator John Fetterman ★

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, on CNN today:

My version of being a man is like, hey, I like rib-eyes, I like Motörhead, and I’m never going to pick on trans kids and gay kids. […] It doesn’t make you tough. It doesn’t make you a man to pick on trans or gay kids. It just makes you an asshole.

Friday, 1 November 2024

Fantastical for Windows — A Glass of Ice Water for Calendar Users in Hell ★

Flexibits:

We’ve spent the last 4 years making Fantastical better than ever across Apple devices, and with version 4.0 we decided to go even bigger by finally bringing the world’s best calendar app to a Windows PC near you. [...]

The best news is that Fantastical for Windows is included in your Flexibits Premium subscription so there are NO extra purchases required!

All the main Fantastical features are there, including the Mini Window with which I pretty much live my calendaring life. On the Mac, the Mini Window lives in the menu bar; on Windows, the system tray.

Flexibits took a lot of arrows in their back when they switched from traditional per-major-version purchasing to subscription-only, but they promised at the time that the predictable, steady revenue from subscriptions would enable them to continue adding value to a Flexibits subscription over time. That started when they added Cardhop, a terrific Mac and iOS contact management app. Now it includes a full-fledged native Windows version of Fantastical.

I’m not sure which is more surprising in this week’s news from first-rate indie Mac apps — Pixelmator getting acquired by Apple, or Fantastical shipping for Windows. I’m trying to think of a similar app — a serious Mac-assed Mac app that eventually was ported to Windows — and I’m coming up empty. It just doesn’t happen. I might go all the way back to Apple bringing iTunes to Windows. Or maybe Instagram expanding to Android after a long initial stretch as iPhone-only.

But even iTunes was oft-criticized by Windows users for lack of adherence to Windows idioms. Especially as the years went on, it seemed like iTunes was used begrudgingly by Windows users (who needed to use it for syncing music, media, and data with their iPods, and later, iPhones), not happily. But the reaction to Fantastical seems overwhelmingly positive from the PC media:

David Pierce at The Verge.
Romain Dillet at TechCrunch.
Jared Newman at FastCompany (“Fantastical is one of the best examples of what a native iOS or Mac app should be. Now, after 13 years of Apple exclusivity, it’s also available for Windows.”)
Laurent Giret at Thurrott.com.
Pradeep Viswanathan at Neowin.

Pixelmator Acquired by Apple; Future of Their Apps Uncertain ★

The Pixelmator blog:

Today we have some important news to share: the Pixelmator Team plans to join Apple. [...]

Pixelmator has signed an agreement to be acquired by Apple, subject to regulatory approval. There will be no material changes to the Pixelmator Pro, Pixelmator for iOS, and Photomator apps at this time. Stay tuned for exciting updates to come.

Pixelmator is their longstanding image editor — more or less, a Photoshop competitor. I first wrote about Pixelmator when it was pre-announced at the end of May 2007, and it looked so good I was dubious it would actually ship in a form resembling the amazing app they previewed. But ship it did, at the end of September that year. I have linked to and referenced Pixelmator dozens of times since. It’s a great app, part of the “Best Mac Apps in the World” firmament.

Photomator is more recent, and arguably more ambitious — if it’s possible to be more ambitious than directly competing with Adobe Photoshop. It’s more like a Lightroom competitor, specifically targeting photo editing and photo library management and batch editing. But unlike Lightroom, Photomator builds atop your iCloud photo library, not its own discrete library. That puts Photomator in competition with a few other excellent third-party apps, like Darkroom and Nitro Photo. These are apps for photographers who want the benefits of storing their photos in Apple’s system photo libraries (convenience, cross-app integration, secure and reliable iCloud sync) but with more powerful editing features than Apple Photos provides.

Both Pixelmator and Photomator are the sort of native third-party apps Apple loves to celebrate. Pixelmator won an Apple Design Award in 2011, and Photomator (at the time named Pixelmator Photo) won an ADA in 2019. A year ago Apple named Photomator the App Store’s Mac App of the Year. Pixelmator has also oft been demoed by Apple during event keynotes, as an exemplar of the functional and performance benefits of building atop native frameworks.

They don’t just happen to be exclusive to Apple’s platforms — they’re fundamentally architected around Apple’s frameworks. The way that a small engineering team (or in the case of Pixelmator rival Acorn, a one-person engineering team) can compete against the veritable army of engineers Adobe has working on Photoshop is by building atop the rich, deep frameworks Apple provides in AppKit and UIKit. And from a design perspective, Pixelmator and Photomator already look like Apple’s own “pro” apps. From the get-go, the Pixelmator team hasn’t just followed Apple’s own trends and guidelines for UI design, they’ve helped define those trends.

Does Apple want to fold these advanced features into Photos? Or do they once again see the need for separate consumer/professional first-party apps? Logic, for example, was an acquisition — but that was all the way back in 2002. If Apple keeps Photomator as an actively developed product, it would be a return to the same genre they walked away from when they discontinued Aperture in 2014. And if Apple keeps Pixelmator going, it would be the first time they go head-to-head against Photoshop itself.

Tucker Carlson Claims He Was Mauled by a Demon While He Slept ★

Isaac Schorr, reporting for Mediaite (with video, in case you don’t believe the following was claimed in all seriousness, which it was):

Asked by his interlocutor, John Heers, if he thought “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good?” Carlson answered “That’s what happened to me,” before recounting the story.

“I had a direct experience with it,” said Carlson.

“In the milieu of journalism?” asked Heers.

“No, in my bed at night,” replied Carlson. “And I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”

“In a spiritual attack by a demon?” inquired Heers.

“Yeah, by a demon,” affirmed Carlson. “Or by something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”

Carlson, of course, was a headline speaker at Trump’s Madison Square Garden “lovefest” last weekend. As recently as last night, Carlson appeared alongside Trump on stage in Arizona — an event at which Trump suggested Liz Cheney should face a firing squad.

Carlson was never hooked up right. And eventually when you’re not hooked up right and you don’t get help, the loose screws start falling out.