Essays and Bad Ideas

The Daily Dad — Feb 8, 2025

  • ‘Flow’ Director Gints Zilbalodis on Animation Styles, Blender
    ❝ ‘Flow’ director Gints Zilbalodis tells IndieWire about working in Blender to create an emotive, evocative animation style.
  • ‘Annie Hall’ Star Tony Roberts Dead at 85
    ❝ Tony Roberts, famous for his work in a bunch of Woody Allen movies, has died.
  • The Last Days of American Orange Juice
    ❝ Health Savor every last drop. February 04, 2025 Whenever my mom comes to visit, she scolds me for not having orange juice in my fridge. “What about your health?” she asks, to which I reply: “What about my bank account?” As in many families, orange juice was always on the breakfast table when I was growing up. It was affordable, delicious, and full of vitamin C. (The high levels of sugar were co…
  • DeepSeek iOS app sends data unencrypted to ByteDance-controlled servers
    ❝ Apple’s defenses that protect data from being sent in the clear are globally disabled.
    💬 Of course it does. I know our native “woo-hoo, America sux0rs” crowd likes to play delusional games about hostile foreign interests, but those hostile foreign interests are not playing games. They want your money, your medical records, and the logins to your municipal water supply… don’t be a fucking sucker.
  • “Torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right”: Meta emails unsealed
    ❝ Meta’s alleged torrenting and seeding of pirated books complicates copyright case.
    💬 To be clear, Meta didn’t do anything that all “AI” companies haven’t been doing… Zuck & Co. are just the only ones dumb enough to leave a trail of documentation. Honestly, the US Copyright Office should declare every AI trained on unlicensed data a public domain resource and put all of this nonsense to rest.
Ozzy
The Amiga’s famed “bouncing ball” animation
  • The Commodore Amiga was perfect
    ❝ Celso Martinho is willing to go a step further than even myself: he thinks the Amiga was the first perfect computer.
    💬 He is right. The Amiga was the Platonic ideal of a computer… it was the essential form of computing. Everything that followed has been fundamentally inferior.
  • Neil Gaiman and Wife Sued for Rape and Trafficking
    ❝ Neil Gaiman, the prolific author of ‘The Sandman’ and other works, was accused in a lawsuit Monday of violent sexual abuse of a babysitter.
    💬 I knew this was coming. It was clear there was a lot more going on here than just “Neil Gaiman randomly plays master/slave games with every girl he meets.” There was an arrangement between Amanda and Neil that served them both for years until… it didn’t. I suspect he crossed some line with some girl —fucked someone she hadn’t picked for him— and Amanda tapped out, but Neil either didn’t get the message or didn’t want to hear it, and disaster ensued.
  • Scientists discover how to hack the vagus nerve to fight autoimmune diseases
    ❝ The vagus nerve is a busy bundle of over 100,000 information-carrying fibers that runs from the brain stem through the body to connect the brain with major organs including the…