Yeah, I had the same thing with the photos of diseased bodies and the disparaging of contraception. I remember in particular that the textbook chapter on abstinence was immediately followed by the chapter on parenthood, which felt like it left a pretty conspicuous gap.

Amusingly there were two very different Health Class experiences to be had at my school. You were assigned one at random, you couldn’t choose which teacher you got. One was a first-year math teacher and member of an unsuccessful local Christian rock band. He’s who I had. The other possibility was a lesbian gym teacher, whose class was apparently (and unsurprisingly) a LOT more useful.

But yeah, the 90’s kinda sucked, and I hate that the US is trundling back towards that kind of “education.”

I feel like there’s a buddhist lesson about impermanence here.

Thanks, Stefon.

I do love games, but most of what I do at my computer is maker projects. CAD, 3d printing, electronics design, coding. Lately I’ve been building a puzzle box for my niece’s birthday.

Interestingly, I did upgrade my GPU a year and a half or so ago (to a used 3070, I’m not made of money) and since then the main thing I’ve used that GPU for is actually AI experiments rather than games. E.g. for the puzzle box, I got Stable Diffusion to generate images for a puzzle for me. It’s four images, and when you combine them in the right way they reveal a fifth image. I don’t think I could have done the same puzzle without AI.

I do still play games, though. I’m just kind of off the big budget stuff these days.

The open display of oligarchy at the inauguration has a bunch of people suddenly turned off of corporate social media sites in general. It’s a meme, basically, but one that could have a positive effect. I’m happier about this than the people flocking to BlueSky.

There are a lot of reasons people might want to switch to Linux from Windows, but I don’t think it’s usually the GUI that’s the main problem on the Windows side. I think it’s pretty reasonable to want the GUI to work in the way you’re used to but still want an OS that doesn’t shove ads at you, install AI without your permission, bug you about Teams and OneDrive, reboot every time it needs to update anything, etc.

A bit of a weird one because it never actually came out, but I was really excited about the news that Michel Gondry was set to direct a film adaptation of Rudy Rucker’s novel The Master of Space and Time. I really like both Gondry and Rucker, and their sensibilities would have worked really well together. The story is kind of a sci-fi three wishes fable. It’s not my favorite of his–that’s gotta be White Light–but it’s really light-hearted and fun. And Gondry is terrific at getting bizarre, dream-like ideas onto film. I’m still bummed out that they cancelled that.

For something that actually did come out but then got cancelled, I enjoyed Disney’s adaptation of The Mysterious Benedict Society. Then they threw that one down the memory hole for tax reasons, so there’s no way to watch it anymore short of piracy. I feel like that shouldn’t be allowed. Seems like they should add least have to provide the Library of Congress with a copy. It’s weird that our cultural history can just be yanked away like that now.

This depended on the phone. The HTC One M8, for instance, had a surprisingly good built-in DAC.

I’ve been seeing that one mentioned a lot lately because the sequel just came out.

Switching my phone screen to black and white actually does help, but the temptation to switch back is powerful.