The Daily Dad

Things you might want to know, for Jun 16, 2023:

• Kesha Calls Viral Seinfeld Snub the ‘Saddest Moment’ of Her Life — Girl, if you were actually watching the show on the plane, you’d know Jerry has issues with casual physical intimacy.
• Confidence in science fell in 2022 while political divides persisted, poll shows — The biggest failure of social media was giving stupid people the opportunity to connect with other stupid people who could reinforce their stupidity. The libertarian/meritocratic ideal that prevailed Way Back When assumed that idiots would be inevitably swatted down by superior facts and arguments… we never considered that the dumbest among us would congregate together and “promote from within”. Turns out that as with a pandemic-spawning virus, it’s easy to underestimate the survival strategies of primitive life forms.
• How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist — Wow, that’s wonderful.
• Jesse Malin, 56, reveals that he’s paralyzed from the waist down — Wow, that’s alarming.
• Ancient Egyptian followers of a deity called Bes may have used hallucinogens

• Legendary Marvel Artist John Romita Sr. Dies Aged 93 — As a kid, I didn’t appreciate JRSR as much as I did JRJR. (In fairness, I didn’t like Kirby or Ditko, either. I was a Neal Adams/Mike Grell kid.) But as I grew older, I developed an admiration for the old man’s talents, and now look back fondly on all the work I once took for granted.
• Apple’s Secret Weapon to Getting PC Games on Mac — There have been lots of headlines like that over the years. We’ll see if this one pans out.
• Rob Schneider to Take on Wokeness in New Fox Nation Stand-up Special — Elle King’s dad is the kind of cutting-edge comedy that the Fox audience can appreciate.
• Southern Baptists vote to expel two churches led by female pastors — Don’t ever let them tell you their trans-panic isn’t inherently misogynist, ‘cause everything they do is inherently misogynist, based as it is on a world-view that demands strict adherence to gendered codes of conduct.
• Brand new Atari 2600 game cartridge coming: ‘Mr. Run and Jump’ — The linked article is busy talking about the VCS cartridge version, but the attached preview is for modern consoles.

• Cormac McCarthy dead at 89
• AirCard Combines Find My Support With a Digital Business Card and More — This is cool, but it isn’t a “business card”. That’s like printing a QR code on a t-shirt and calling it a business card.
• Instant Pot’s maker declares bankruptcy amid declining sales — My Instant Pot has sat unplugged and idle for years. Its only purpose now is to hold the supply of weed gummies and vape cartridges, because, well, Instant Pot.
• The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens — Peter Theil and his ilk need to be shut down en masse.
• You No Longer Have to Be a Pro to Get a Big-Screen MacBook — I’m still happy with my M1 Air, but when the day comes that I need to upgrade, the 15” Air will be the way I go.

• Riley Keough to Pay Priscilla Presley, Ending Legal Battle Over Family Trust — I’m a little surprised this settled so quickly and quietly. But Reilly has a career of her own now, and who wants to spend grandma’s twilight years fighting over a million here and there?
• Deepfake porn of TikTok stars thrives on Twitter even though it breaks the platform’s rules — The real societal change of the 21st century is in the way that reputation and personal narrative are now assets the average person values. If pornfakery becomes truly verboten, it won’t be for the sake of privacy or decency or liberation… it’ll be because no one can afford to have their lives devalued.
• Tactical Free Radio — Pump up the volume, man.
• Apple redesigns its Shortcuts app in iOS 17 to be easier to use — Not enough of you are using Shortcuts, or even know it exists. But you should. It’s an app that ties other apps together… it’s programmatic duct-tape, for lack of a better metaphor. I use Shortcuts every day, to generate posts like the one you’re reading: I “favorite” articles in my RSS newsreader, and when it’s time to post The Daily Dad, I hit a button. With one tap, my “RSS to Tumblr” shortcut grabs the favorited articles, organizes them into a bulleted list of links, and posts the whole thing as a draft to my Tumblr, where I can add images and commentary before adding it to the queue. Same thing with my livestream announcements… I edit a tiny text file that contains a description of the night’s show, then hit a button. Poof, Shortcuts automatically turns up the lights in my studio, sends out an “I’m streaming now” message to all relevant parties, puts all my devices into a specific Focus mode, and then posts the show description to Tumblr without me doing anything else.
• Every Season of Love Island, Ranked — I can quibble with most of this, but I’m comfortable with their #1.