i heart velma

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
mostlysignssomeportents
mostlysignssomeportents

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

A wood-panelled public meeting room with a full gallery. A marionette stands at a mic, testifying. On the wall is the logo for SoCal Gas. Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/ Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792 CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ALT

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

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It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

Keep reading

paulinedorchester
paulinedorchester

I have no plans to see Oppenheimer. Here's why:

To begin with, the last film directed by Christopher Nolan that I saw was Dunkirk, and I enjoyed that in spite of two important things: the sound design, which was realistically noisy but got in the way of, y'know, intelligible dialogue; and Hans Zimmer's derivative, repetitive score (seriously it was just the chord progression from the "Nimrod" section of Elgar's Enigma Variations, over and over and over again. And both won Oscars! What the actual fuck?)

More to the point, though: this is not exactly an undertold story — quite the opposite, in fact. It has already had (at least) two dramatizations that can be described as essential. Here's some information about one of them.

Oppenheimer (TV series) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org

This was a major departure for Masterpiece Theatre at that time. Sadly, it doesn't seem to be available for streaming anywhere.

The other one can be streamed at the link below, although it may be blocked outside the U.S.

Doctor Atomic | The Metropolitan Opera | PBS LearningMedia
On July 16, 1945, an atomic bomb was tested for the first time in the deserts of New Mexico; within a few short weeks, the entire world woul
PBS LearningMedia

It's a definitive performance of this work, which is by John Adams and Peter Sellars; through July 28th only, it can also be streamed free of charge and, as far as I know, from anywhere in the world, here:

Doctor Atomic>
Met Opera on Demand delivers instant access to more than 500 Met performances, including Live in HD videos, classic telecasts and radio broa
Met Opera on Demand

And finally, here are some things that you really ought to know about the subject matter, and which I gather are more-or-less completely ignored in the film:

The Jewish story behind ‘Oppenheimer,’ explained - Jewish Telegraphic Agency
The pioneering physicist’s moral worldview and politics were shaped by a complicated relationship with his Jewishness and a hatred of the Na
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
apatosaurus
vinceaddams

An underrated piece of youtube advice is don't put anything important in the lower right corner of the thumbnail because the timestamp will cover it up.

I made a file the size of a thumbnail that's just blank with a proportional screenshot of a timestamp in the corner, so that I can put that in a layer and see where it is.

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iheartvelma

Just generally speaking, get familiar with the concept of the broadcast safe area.

Since the days of analog television, we’ve known that receiving sets may have different settings than ideal - the picture may be adjusted larger or smaller, so information at the edges may be cut off due to falling outside the overscan boundary.

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With streaming, there’s all kinds of overlays, titles, broadcast network “bugs” (translucent logos that persist in the corner like a watermark) and so on.

Using a guide like the one above will ensure that no matter what might be framing your content, your titles won’t end up cropped out.

video editing youtube broadcast safe area titles and motion graphics
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Overcame my weekend lethargy and finally started setting up the downstairs AV stuff. The place came with built-in shelves downstairs so it’s saved me from having to assemble a ton of Ikea.

I hung some grey felt carpet padding from Rugs.com behind the TV using four 3M Command adhesive strips along the top, and used a narrow strip of the same stuff under the TV.

Rearranged the Ethernet switch (everything is hardwired), unpacked my surround receiver, hooked up the PS4, Apple TV and Switch docking station, started getting the speakers wired.

Also unpacked the last sets of books and LPs, and put them out on the shelves.

It’s only been a year!

unpacking domestic nerdery
macmanx
onetwothreemany

FEMA is doing an emergency alert test on all TVs, radios, and cell phones on October 4, 2023, at approximately 2:20pm ET.

If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.

Yes, I'm doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.

Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I'm bad at tags.

ideal future houses

I often wonder about what kind of house we will live in, if we are lucky enough to buy one.

I love modernism, but I also love the look of classic Collegiate Gothic and the Prairie School. When I see Café Brauer at the Lincoln Park Zoo, I think I want my house to look a lot like that.

I weirdly like institutional materials, like terrazzo flooring that curves up the sides of the walls, like we had in our grade school, and things like window seats and cubbies and lots of simple, clean, built-in bookshelves. And a mix of picture and clerestory windows, skylights and deep overhangs to keep things cool in the summer.

A courtyard-esque U layout maybe with a water feature in the middle; a zen garden fountain / pond? An outbuilding studio, or separate wings for our offices / hobby spaces? (yes, luxurious.)

I kinda like the aesthetic of a corner store for the kitchen. A couple of those 55" sliding-door glass merchandiser fridges, maybe a display rack and pegboard hooks for snacks and candy. A small magazine stand, even. A wall of pegboard hooks for pots and pans and drawers with holders for lid storage. A nice, wide 5-burner induction range, dual wall ovens (those kind from the Baking Show with the slide-under doors).

Instead of a trendy overhang kitchen island counter with stools, keep that slightly separated, but use something more like a diner booth, complete with little jukebox selector and that little holder for ketchup, mustard, vinegar and napkins. It could be semi-modular, with storage underneath, to expand to different configurations for dinner parties, but keeping things cozy.

Lots of solar, ground-source heat pump geothermal, ideally a net-zero house.

house ideas utopian ideas
leohttt
leohttt

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there's a quality here about language that this episode gets right. i think largely scifi media, particularly star trek, has sort of let the bias towards vocality influence the world-building of alien languages, when, to me, the more obvious standard galactic idiom if it came to exist would be something way closer to sign language. sounds as units of significance only work in very specific mediums and definitely don't work across voids. (and like i'm always hoping that i'll see the actual and complete linguistic complexity of a sign-language represented in alien-narratives (not just the ink-blots, like in arrival)--gestures as units of significance!--in human culture we haven't even scratched the surface of the ways a linguistically-trained human brain will create language from body-gestures, with all the home signing and whatnot going on all over the world from the creative and intuitive efforts of deaf and hearing impaired people--but that's sort of tangential to this post)--

so i really like that it's not immediately obvious that these aliens living in the "deuterium" in the nebula are speaking a language at all--let alone exist. it takes uhura, the linguist, to extrapolate from the facts of the situation as well as the fact that language is both fundamentally representative (the word is not the thing) while being drawn inextricably from material. while the language can barely be detected as a language, the abstractions are still communicated, and it makes sense that they would sound to uhura the way they do considering they're living in a nebula which is more dense with matter than the full void but is still not the stable atmosphere of a planet that would allow for a human-translatable vocality.

so "experience" becomes the unit of significance for these aliens, the evolved emotion of conscious beings recognizing another conscious being. the episode had a funny technobabble explanation about planes of existence and how the aliens were living in "higher-dimension," which makes sense, in a enormously abstract way, when you think of four-dimensional creatures being able to look down on us in the same way we look down on the second-dimension and can see everything. but that idea implies a relationship with time that i personally can't imagine and an understanding of causality that would dictate a specific way that uhura can communicate with them, which is contrary to what they show in the episode.

she says "keep going" looking at her own deep pain and takes a step closer to it because this plot of Translation is about what all translation is about---intimacy, embodied and immaterial. it's the sharing of vulnerability which allows one person to recognize the self-hood of another--and it requires uhura to be open to communication and the possibility of there being a self capable of communicating in the first place as well as quite literally opening her body up to receiving the tangible communication. the act of listening here is no different than the way ears allow a touch to communicate acoustic information. under the technobabble, the argument is really about what it means to exist in the state of translation, between one idiom and another, where everything is both ideation and sensation, and at some point you have to cross from one end to the other and lose as little data as possible.

and the way uhura is able to do that! she is literally discovering new worlds and new civilizations, because she is a linguist.