The Offline Report

I wrote a post about Mike Pesca but the truth is I've never met him and I don't care. Here was the original post, dated Feb 23, 2021: Mike Pesca is one of the few audiocasters right now who doesn't speak in what I call "NPR voice": that whispered, academic timbre that just sounds left-leaning. His intonations instead contain punctuation, even enthusiasm. Which is rare. He speaks with energy. But he's been suspended indefinitely as of yesterday. Why? Pesca's suspended because he said in a Slack discussion when he thought it was appropriate for a non-black journalist (or was it white journalist?) to use the N-word (rhymes with trigger). This is very concerning to me because I'm left-of-center and it raises hairs on my neck, so I feel a responsibility to voice out loud my concerns. I do this because if I'm feeling it, many people who won't bother to say so are absolutely feeling it and making backup plans of their own. Pesca's suspension ...

A New York Times OpEd titled Why QAnon Flopped in Japan says: Another defense against misinformation is the dominance of Japan’s legacy print and broadcast media, an unintended effect of its gate-keeping. Backed by a fairness doctrine in national broadcast law, programming must avoid distorting facts, stay politically fair and not harm public safety. The law has hampered the rise of overtly partisan television and radio; there is no 24/7 broadcast news cycle clamoring for scoops. Japanese newspapers also continue to enjoy some of the world’s highest print circulation. So they haven’t seriously explored digital distribution and hardly acknowledged online current affairs until recently. The upside of that is fringe theories aren’t so easily laundered into the mainstream news — in contrast with the United States, where a single tweet can and often does make headlines. What a strange and lazy conflation: because you're reading Japanese newspapers "in print", then ...

Oh he said it. He took a bold step. Kevin Roose said it : “For me, the best attention-guarding ritual of all is reading — sitting down to read physical, printed books for long stretches of time, with my phone sequestered somewhere far away.” Of course, if reader zooms back, they discover the boomer writer included this disclaimer first so that people didn't dismiss this comment as symptomatic of an OLDE person: Thus technology becomes humanity’s master, rather than the reverse. “There are established ways to train our brains to better guard our attention,” writes Roose — who, it is worth noting, is a millennial-era writer who specializes in digital technology . “For me, the best attention-guarding ritual of all is reading — sitting down to read physical, printed books for long stretches of time, with my phone sequestered somewhere far away.” Further Reading: ---------------------------------- "The kiosks are like vending machines for creative writing, dispensing st...

The Los Angeles Times has an article out today profiling high school kids and how they adjusted to school-from-home. Some cited setbacks, such as this 11th grader: At times, Leila has felt alone and unmotivated. Procrastination sometimes led to turning in work late and a lower score. While she used to feel comfortable raising her hand in class, online her anxiety increases as she fears repeating a question or asking the wrong one with everyone listening. This twelfth grader: Before the pandemic, he was earning A’s and Bs. Now, he’s looking at Cs and Ds, and an F. “I always get into my head too much,” Lucas said during a video call. “If I go too deep into thought about what we’re in and how this is going to end — or if it is going to end — I do get sad.” This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, A Bucks County woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to harass rivals on her daughter’s cheerleading squad, DA says : A Bucks County woman anonymously sent coaches on her teen daughter’s cheerleading squad fake photos and videos that depicted the girl’s rivals naked, drinking, or smoking, all in a bid to embarrass them and force them from the team, prosecutors say. The woman, Raffaela Spone, also sent the manipulated images to the girls, and, in anonymous messages, urged them to kill themselves, Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub’s office said. From a Grand Rapids, Michigan NBC affiliate Playing ‘Price is Right’-style game, GR doctors post operating room photos online : One picture showed a doctor posing with a length of fibrous tissue in his hand. It appeared the patient from whom the tissue came was still lying on the operating table. A second post showed a physician holding an organ that was removed in a cancer operation. “The other...

Lou Ottens, the inventor of the cassette tape, has passed away at the age of 94. pic.twitter.com/6Ff1aGRV6z — Lord Arse! 🕹️ (@Lord_Arse) March 10, 2021 From newsletters and conversations on social media, people express affection for his invention. Rusty Foster, author of "Today in Tabs" newsletter wrote : Today in Unmoored Nostalgia: I miss mixtapes, the click and hiss, the awkward uneven silences between songs, the word “dub.” The inventor of the cassette tape, Lou Ottens, just died. Playlists aren’t the same, you can’t hear the hands of the person who made a playlist carefully stitching it together. Playlists are fungible, mixtapes weren’t. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

A human and robot hugging will not evoke the heart symbol unless the person who created the robot makes a strong enough impression in the broader culture and is associated with that robot. Still, it's doubtful circuit boards and transistors will ever suffice for one half of the heart symbol. I once had a very rational therapist who advised me to take time away, even consider moving away, from people in my life who were not respecting my boundaries. I asked wasn't life about shared experiences? He replied "you shouldn't need other people in your life. You have yourself." It was shortly after that I entertained the idea of God for the first time. I wasn't a "believer" but I chose to consider the God concept, if only to supply myself with received love and a route to reciprocation. At some point after launching this blog I became fascinated with the heart symbol. Where did it come from, was it cross-cultural? It dates back to Greek and Roman time...

Socially distanced patrons, eleven months into a pandemic, were lined up for two blocks to pick up traditional Lunar New Year dishes from Ming's restaurant on Taraval. Roast duck, fried pork and "noodles for longevity" were cited to a street reporter as dishes of choice. In the foreground, the subway L streetcar line is still out of service nearly from the beginning of shelter-in-place as workers reinforce the tracks' foundation. The tracks were originally built atop sand dunes. Asian Americans have been targeted with hate crimes in the Bay Area this month. It seems to be originating from online memes and manifesting in meat space. This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

Feb. 9, 2021 Maine Startup Aims To Pull Carbon Out Of The Atmosphere By Growing — And Then Sinking — Kelp Farms:     mainepublic.org Coronavirus pandemic leaves China’s over-35s with uncertain job prospects     scmp.com "Four of the top 10 search results for "vaccine" on Facebook-owned Instagram were for anti-vaccination accounts, including "vaccinetruth," "vaccinefreedom," "antivaxxknowthefacts," and "cv19vaccinereactions," according to a series of searches conducted by CNN Business from multiple different Instagram handles beginning two weeks ago."    cnn.com    🐤 Virus Variant First Found in Britain Now Spreading Rapidly in U.S.:     nytimes.com "Why aren’t they being fixed? Most of the security teams working at software companies have limited time and resources, she suggests— and if their priorities and incentives are flawed, they only check that they’ve fixed the very specific vulnerability in fr...

My office mates complained that wafts of microwaving brocolli distracted them, but that tension was a small tradeoff for the benefits in concentration this food gave me. Drizzled and olive oil, lightly salted, cooked brocolli kept the oxygen flowing. I ate so much broccoli my freezer was filled with bags of florets. I moved out of one apartment because it had such a small freezer. Sometimes if I needed to finish a paid writing assignment, I splurged on these fresh, organic "baby" broccoli bunches which seem to fast-track the oxygen effect. But I ran into a problem. It was too starchy of a vegetable, much like squash, and lost its affect. I needed to diversify my vegetables. Uncooked watery produce like carrots and lettuce seemed to bind to something in my digestive tract and push it through even more. It was as if the broccoli-only diet gave a boost to the effects of jicama, carrots and watercress. This is a mid-level flexitarian knowledge base I'm building. I don't...