On this day in 2004 I was in Boston to blog the Democratic National Convention, esp with my newfangled audio blog post thing. #

Somewhere in this timeframe Adam Curry began Daily Source Code which is still running to this day, almost 20 years later.#

Has anyone ever seen Trump laugh?#

Biden's speech might turn out to be a Gettysburg type speech. I hope it does. #

We're at a huge fork in the road. One fork -- goodbye USA, the other way, we're stronger than ever. We're in a good spot imho because Trump's tank is empty. He's old, tired, fat, addled, fetid, rotten. You have to work really hard not to see that. If it works, Biden will have stabilized the country, and Harris will erect the guardrails that make sure no one follows in Trump's path, and the Supreme Court gets back into its proper place. They've been overthrowing our society, economy and political system. That all has to be reversed before it does too much damage, and prevented in the future. I want to know why the court can't be expanded, and if Harris will put that in her platform. #

I almost used enshitification in a post yesterday. #

It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent. #

Pretty remarkable how abusive the bots on Twitter have become. Makes discourse there seem pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.#

I want a Masto-clone that does not do replies. You can't insert anything under my idea, but you can if you like include my idea, as a link, in yours. This model works. I think by now we know the other way does not work. BTW I use the term Masto-clone interchangeably with Twitter-like. Let's spread the love around. #

Software-wise I realized recently that everything that takes me away from creating really nice writing and publishing tools is a waste. I have to get off track because there are huge holes in the web as a runtime platform. And every year it gets worse as new incompatible languages are added, new incompatible stacks built. As a result we have to re-do everything all the time, and never get a chance to create new user experience. The market fragments, which is exactly what the tech companies want. It keeps their products from becoming commodities. And like it or not, the politicians and corporations don't want us writing too much, they just want us working, donating to their campaigns, paying taxes, buying their crap, and not getting all agitated about things they don't care about. #

Is Reddit now only available on Google search? #

Fantastic speech by President Biden. It's good we'll have both a president and a campaign and that they'll be separate thing. I look forward to reading it slowly. And he put a cap on the awful communication of the last month, he took control of the story from the snobs and shit throwers in the press. #

How Harry McCracken discovered that ChatGPT is a deeply and broadly knowledgable, infinitely patient, always available, inexpensive, programming partner. I've been using it that way for a year, and it has enabled me to take on much more ambitious and complete projects. It could evolve into something much more powerful, but where it is now is already amazing. The criticisms for ChatGPT have mostly missed the point of what it's useful for. #

Show notes for today's Scripting podcast.#

I was able to follow kamalhq on twitter. This report says that Musk is rate-limiting followers on that account. Of course we warned what could happen if a Republican bought twitter, but I didn't honestly contemplate that a fascist would. These days our greatest fears aren't scary enough. People laugh that Musk paid too much for twitter, but if the US ends up as an autocracy, the oligarch that owns the entire news distribution system for the world will probably have the last laugh. BTW, if you want to know why we're so thrilled to have Harris as the candidate, even though we didn't want Joe to give in, it's because no informed and sane person wants to live in a new Trump term. We tried that if you recall. The hope you hear now is much greater than the hope we had when Obama was selling that (though hope was a good word for it). Today it's the hope that we won't be deported or worse.#

All the reporters know the Repubs refused to fund border stuff so they could use it to tag the Dems in the election. So the first thing the Repubs do is tag VP Harris with the border. The reporter asks a Dem what they have to say about that. But the reporter knows what the Repubs did. So why do they even ask the freaking question? They just play the script the Repubs wrote for them. They are so savvy, but we heard all that too, so we know how corrupt they are. They don't care if we know.#

I want future President Harris to stay happy no matter what the bastards do or say. We should have a crisis line for her to call to get some quick love. 1-800-LUV-KAMALA. #

Show notes for 2004 pre-DNC podcast, part of the Podcast0 series. #

For the DNC in 2004, we had a site called Convention Bloggers. It was a river of news feed reader, clearly done with Frontier, of blogs run by people who were at the convention.#

I'm doing something new. Trying to initiate topics on the social web. We almost totally respond to external stuff, I wonder how different it would be if we engaged on a more individual level. I've been doing this for a while, but only now am able to explain it. #

Looking forward to the NYT deeply analyzing Trump‘s 78 year old mind and body and his Hannibal Lecter stories.#

The earth shook today. I'm watching the news like everyone else after President Biden withdrew. There really is a lot happening very quickly, and the Dems all sound like they got their story straight, for once the Dems sound like a party. How did that happen. NakedJen says we need a miracle. I said that's her department. ❤️#

I trust that President Biden will do what's best for the country.#

Pete Buttigieg should be the Democrats' official blogger. Every day a new insight into what makes people do what they do and why the Dems have all the right ideas. He's a perfect spokesperson in that role. A daily Pete. He should do it.#

Like it or not, Twitter is still the social web of record. This is something we need to fix. It's going to take a long time, but it has to start. #

Isn't it surprising, with old age such an important topic, that we aren't learning more about it? I'm there now, myself -- immersed in it, can't escape it. I guess I didn't want to know about it until I had to. It's a real perspective-shift. #

An eye-opening segment on Brian Lehrer's show today. The first half is an interview with Hakeem Jeffries, you can skip that part, pretty standard stuff. It gets interesting at 17:50 when they take calls from listeners. A lot of different points of view from people of all ages, they're incredibly passionate, well thought-out, coherent. This is way better than the punditry you hear on news. The real crime here is that the insiders of the Democratic Party are taking control, after they were manipulated by the press. A total insider's route-around of the democratic process, it's just as bad imho as what the Repubs are planning around Election Day. The press did the same thing to NY governor Andrew Cuomo, who was elected by the people, and forced out without any legal process, and certainly not a vote. That experience argues in favor of when you're in doubt, do the thing the voters said to do. Anything else is very very questionable. Why are you taking control? Where are you authorized to do that? I think perhaps some of the Dems forget how huge an issue this was in the 2016 process. #

Historically it's unjustifiable. The NYT et al are grievously wrong, and that should be reflected on their op-ed pages. We've been here before, this is as much a hack as Hillary's Emails. Maybe you can't see it now, but win or lose, people are going to look at this period when we all lost our minds.#

I posted the above piece around the social web, I like the way it looks on Threads the best. #

Matt says some interesting new stuff is coming from Automattic now that WordPress 6.6 is out. Something for writers? Perhaps something that moves WordPress into a space adjacent to twitter-like systems? They just added support for Threads to WordPress, so now you can crosspost from a blog to a thread. Haven't tried it yet. They also have a new identity system built around Gravatar, announced in early June. It'll be interesting to see what they come out with. I wonder if there is a developer ecosystem building on this, and if they have an evangelism program. I have my own vision of how these things should work. #

Now that Elon Musk is giving so generously, dollars and flow, to the fascists, he's encouraging more of us to use Zuckerberg's twitter-like system, aka Threads. But Zuck isn't making it go down easy. There's a piece in Bloomberg (paywall) that says Trump is badass but isn't supporting either candidate. What could possibly go wrong? #

Nancy Wicklund Gonzalez: "I’ve had to switch to watching the BBC. American news is unwatchable. Between the lionization of a sociopath and the denigration of a decent man, I just can’t even." #

I'm avoiding the actual RNC, the speakers are just actors. Trump looks like the Queens kid he is. People from Queens don't feel like we really belong, except with other Queens people. We expect to be thought of as the kid from Queens. I know this so well. So the "boss" slumps around not sure what to do or say. He's not gregarious. Not in charge of anything. #

If the world doesn't know you did something you might as well not have done it. This is what Doug Engelbart learned, and what we learned in his aftermath. He is known for inventing the mouse, because that's the one thing he invented everyone knows about. He also developed software that pioneered using a computer to organize your ideas. For the most part people don't know about that because (I guess) most people don't organize their work?#

Today's song: It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine). #

The Repubs can win by throwing the election into the House. They can probably get it by the courts in enough places, just a couple of swing states, and they win even if they lose by normal vote-counting methods. The whole bit about Biden's age is meant to distract us from the fact it probably doesn't matter how old the Democratic candidate is.#

Highly recommend this Netflix series -- esp the last three episodes. I found it enlightening, even though I lived through most of this history, I never saw it all put together in a series of events over decades. I came out of it with a much clearer perspective of where we are in the Cold War. It never was over. "The end of history" was too good to be true. Also glad I read so much about slavery a few years ago. If you put both these together, you get the USA, and the deep and lasting wounds we keep re-opening. #

Shownotes for the Podcast0 from July 16, 2004. #

The problem with JD Vance is that he's empty inside, he'll be whatever he needs to be to get more power, and he's young. He's as empty as Trump, and much younger, so we can't hope to outwait him. Now we have a real problem, because Trump has a successor. I imagine Trump's sons probably aren't happy about this. Had he picked Little Marco, no one would mistake him as an heir, or Doug Burgum who is a bit too old to be an heir (same age as I am). We do have a problem with Biden, he hasn't prepared for this moment. Old or not, they had 3.5 years to get ready, and they didn't. As I wrote yesterday, the biggest most important thing is that we organize ourselves. That's the best defense all around. Every attempt to corral the insurrection has been either non-existent or overwhelmingly inadequate. Trump should be out of the picture, and for a while it seemed as if he was getting there, but now he's back, and probably a bigger threat than ever. I don't think replacing Biden is anywhere near enough. We need leadership. Not wait to be led. We've waited too long. People who appear ready to step up -- AOC, Bernie Sanders. Who else? I wouldn't put Obama on that list, he tried to welcome Trump, even let him have his Supreme Court pick, just to be a nice guy. We are not going to prevail by being nice, unfortunately. We're also not going to prevail by each of us taking care of Number One. We have to work together. Organize and work together. Those ought to be our mantras until we achieve them.#

And btw, don't panic. You can't accomplish anything that way.#

Today's adventure: "The great and cute Wordle Kitty was surprisingly chosen to be the running mate of the most popular presidential candidate in the history of the United States, who happens to also be very very old so that’s why they nominated the cute little cat to be the vice president because she is so young and so incredibly cute."#

Al Sharpton should write the defining op-ed in the NYT, not George Clooney, who is very pretty, and a great choice to cast in movies like Up In The Air or Michael Clayton, but we don't know anything about his political judgement. He hasn't done anything to tell us who he is in that dimension. To the extent that we do know anything about him: 1. He's a prankster. 2. He has a brilliant and beautiful wife. 3. He has a huge mansion in Italy which he keeps very private. 4. He's rich. We have nothing in common. He should run for office and get in the mix. The fact that the NYT chose him, that says something about them, they don't care what people think, or they think we're really shallow and will fall for bullshit like George Clooney. He loves Biden. We didn't even know he knew Joe Biden! Why should Clooney have more of a say in this than I do? Tell me what Nancy Pelosi thinks, or Al Sharpton. Or give Michael Moore a shot. He has a lot more skin in the game than Clooney. I'd love to read an op-ed by David Frum. Liz Cheney. Elie Mystal.#

We. Need. To. Organize. Democrats should roll out new initiatives with the same skill as Apple rolls out new products. Not the same as Steve Jobs, that's asking too much. But with focus and showmanship, and a livestream, and fanbois and Al Sharpton in place of John Gruber. Focus our attention on each product (ie climate change, social security, Ukraine, etc), so the ideas don't get missed, and we can network in support of the initiative. This is all part of the idea of having a democratic.party website that we call call home for our political organizing. None of this pissing in the wind we do on twitter-like systems. Form buddy groups of people we organize with, based on locality or common interests. Organize the people as well as the billionaires are organized. This is what political parties should be in 2024 for crying out loud. We're missing the point of the mess in our politics. It's all a mess because it needs to be organized and it's not. Maybe I should take everything else off my blog now so I can use what little attention I have been able to gather here to focus on this idea. #

NYT -- put one of your readers on the op-ed page, so we can talk to your readers about you. It would be the bravest and smartest thing you ever did.#

Shownotes for today's Podcast0 episode.#

On this blog 20 years ago: "Our mission when covering the DNC is to figure out what goes on at a DNC. On the other hand, some portion of the 15,000 reporters at the DNC will be trying to figure out what we, the bloggers, are doing at the DNC. I suspect most of them will conclude that we don't belong there, in the same way most of the early articles about weblogs concluded we are not going to kill professional journalism." This turned out to be true. #

TWiT studio in Petaluma is shutting down. A lot of great stuff came out of this place. Please take a video of the studio before it closes down for good. I've learned this over and over, having shut down a few offices where great stuff was created and forgetting to do this. #

In today's Kitty Komix episode: "The very cute but also very courageous Wordle Kitty is learning how to be a surgeon. They brought a mysterious leader into the operating room and asked the Kitty to please operate on the leader and save his life so Wordle Kitty got out the textbook and read up on brain surgery, even though the patient only had a nick on his ear, which was admittedly very bloody, she operated on the patient’s brain and unfortunately the patient died. So we are looking at the scene where the dead body of the patient is on the operating table and Wordle Kitty is smoking a cigarette, relaxing and reflecting on what she learned. She’s still very cute of course."#

This blog 20 years ago today.#

The shownotes for today's Podcast0 episode. The shownotes pages now have a player. Still have a little more work to do on it. I like this because it's a lightweight project, which is something I need while the world is boiling over. #

This blog 20 years ago today.#

The show notes for today's Podcast0 episode. #

Does the marquee element in HTML work in your browser?#

This post on Threads has already gotten over 7K reads. That's a lot for me, on any platform, and I have far fewer followers there, and no blue checkmark. #

The episode from this day in 2004 is now in the Podcast0 feed. #

Here are the show notes for this episode. #

Today's song: Respect Yourself. For all of us, but especially the people of the United States of America.#

I had a post here about the inevitability of Biden stepping aside, then I turned on the news and saw how the press was humiliating the President at a meeting with the president of Ukraine. We can't give into this. How dare they insult the president as he represents the US in NATO. I can't get behind this. We're in a bad bad place. #

If you listened to my audio blog posts in the summer of 2004, I recommend subscribing to the new podcast0 feed. I just listened to the show from this day 20 years ago. It was quite a throwback, lots of questions about what I was talking about, I've forgotten a lot of it. It took a full hour to prepare the feed. I can tell this is going to be quite a flashback experience. Maybe it'll get me in the mode to do some serious innovating, because we were on fire and didn't know it, in so many ways, back in the summer of 2004.#

If we were organized we could handle anything. The only reason we're panicking about Biden's capability is that our news flow is owned by largely invisible media moguls. The only way out of this mess is to route around them.#

I agree with Manton. The way the twitter-alikes do discourse is not the only possible way, and imho, and, as I've said before (in 2007!), most of what passes for discourse on twitter is actually spam, and that goes for Masto, Threads, Bluesky and Facebook (aka FriendFeed). #

It bugs me that there’s all this focus on Biden, when what we really need is to organize as voters so we can be ready to deal with whatever happens. That’s the real problem. The press can point out a problem, and it is a problem, but no one has the ability to build a consensus among voters. I think it’s possible to put together an online version of the Democratic Party, something that never goes away, is available to rally the electorate at any moment. That’s the way to neutralize the power of the media moguls who have us wrapped around their fingers.#

Suppose Biden abdicates. What happens then? How does this not become a mess like Bernie and Hillary, or Nader and Gore, Perot and Clinton, Kennedy and Carter, McCarthy, RFK and Humphrey.#

Joni Mitchell: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone."#

If you've lived much at all you know what Joni says is true. I got there when my grandmother died in 1977, when I was 22, my first close relative that I lost, and I tried to come to grips with the idea that I'd never see her again and found it impossible, but it was true nonetheless. No way to escape it. When my mother died, in 2018, I only thought after we cleared her house to be sold, the house I grew up in, that I didn't even take pictures of it before it was emptied. I was so used to it being a constant, I forgot to realize until it was too late, that I was saying goodbye to everything I knew for my entire life. Forever. It's why we're playing such a dangerous game of chicken with Biden's presidency, because the stakes are so incredibly high. A mathematical approach to this problem says imho that everyone should shut the fuck up about Biden's flaws and get us organized so we can handle any eventuality. The problem isn't that Biden might die, the problem is that even if he were to win, we'll be right back here in another four years, and at that time we will have to grapple with an even more dire situation. Whatever happens this year, what's waiting for us is for most of us to wake up from the dream that there are any constants in our lives. It's all falling apart, in every way. The only thing that matters is we start working together, intelligently, or else it's over. #

I admit that after the debate and the interminable attacks from the press on our democratic process that I'm pretty depressed about the future. I was talking with a friend over the weekend, a fellow NYer who moved up to the mountains as I did, about the political situation, and I asked if he would be prepared to sign a loyalty oath to Trump. He said he'd never do it. If they tried to force him, he'd get a gun and shoot them. This isn't the first time I've heard that, and I called bullshit. You're never going to do that. I know this guy, I know myself. I won't do it either. And I think I probably will have to sign the loyalty oath and so will you. There are so many ways to turn your life off, legally -- and without recourse. Think about what happens when you lose access to a social media account. Or when a credit rating agency doesn't believe you are who you are. Or when someone hijacks your phone and you can't get back control of it (and try to use anything without a working phone number). I've been through all these miserable processes. And none of them were legal, or controlled by the US government. A president who demands loyalty of you will get it. And that is certainly exactly where we're headed, again. #

I find the blogroll on the home page of my blog to be an incredible way to catch up on what people I follow are posting to their blogs and news sites. It's more like a feed reader than a blogroll because when a site updates it moves to the top of the list and when you click the wedge next to the title you get the five most recent posts with links to the full story. Maybe it was a mistake calling this a blogroll. I'm trying to come up with a better place to put it so more people would see it and use it and might think it would be nice to have a place like that for themselves. In any case I'm thinking about what to do next with FeedLand, which is what's behind the blogroll software. It hasn't lived up to my hopes, and I don't think it's likely to. I may be done writing software for others, I was writing only for myself for a few years, between 2017 and 2021, and I really liked that. The experiment of writing for others was not a success. So I'm thinking about how to wind down FeedLand, keep it available for the people who are already using it, but close it to new membership. Just thinking out loud here for a bit. It's that time, to consider what I want to do with the next few years, assuming, praise Murphy, I have them to play with. 😄#

I'm glad Biden is attacking journalists, he has a much bigger voice than I do. If I had his influence I'd be saying the same things, though I wouldn't be as kind. It's time to put the journalists back where they belong, covering news, not trying to run the country. #

I feel about twitter the same as I feel about the nytimes. As if we're not on speaking terms. Not that the nytimes ever listened, or really twitter, for that matter.#

Is Sulzberger another Musk. Inherited something of value, moving as quickly as possible to destroy that value.#

It's time to stop caring what journalists think.#

We should try this someday: A twitter-like system built with feeds, with all their limits. People can link to my posts, but not attach themselves to my flow. Goodbye spam and the motive for abuse, attention. Something I'd like to try someday, but first you need people who are interested. It's a chicken and egg thing. #

I wonder if people remember what a divided Democratic party is like. Obama had Hillary. Hillary had Bernie. Gore had Nader. Bill Clinton had Perot. I guess Mondale and Dukakis unified the party? Before that, Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, that was something. open war. Probably we'll all be wishing for Joe Biden if you all succeed at getting him to resign. BTW he's just one person, there's a limit to how much bullshit one person can absorb.#

Journalists don't give the orders. That's what's out of whack. #

I cancelled my NYT subscription. They can't hear their readers. It's time for a new journalism, and we're going to have to do it without them. I haven't cancelled my Washington Post subscription yet, but I'm pretty sure that's coming soon enough.#

You say you want Biden to step down. You've been heard. This is the President of the United States. If you don't respect the man at least respect the office. #

Congrats to Threads on a good first year. Looks like I signed in on opening day, July 5, 2023. They have done a good job of slipping into the spot previously occupied exclusively by Twitter.#

Threads gives you a virtual ticket stub for when you join, nice touch.#

Threads: "The reason people are finally talking about Project 2025 is because an actress used her platform to bring attention to it when the media failed to."#

This year I'm thinking how we can boot up a source of news that has the balance we deserve. Now that the Supreme Court is no longer keeping up any pretense of respecting the Constitution, and journalism is either colluding, or preparing for their meeting with a military tribunal in March next year, followed by, if lucky, a re-education camp, we need help knowing what's real and what's not. #

I hear that cancelling a NYT subscription is wicked hard. That alone makes me feel like cancelling. I cancelled their morning email of things I need to know about. It's one thing for them to exclusively report on Biden's age in their space, but my mailbox is mine. Get the F out of my mailbox. #

Gordon McLean asks: "If I was to move my blog away from WordPress, what platform is simplest?" #

I added a section to this site's About page re "Not secure."#

Truth be told one of the reasons I added it now was because I wanted a place to use the new easter egg Nakedjen recorded for me (and you).#

Olbermann calls on Biden to resign, making Harris the incumbent.#

Somehow, even though I watched an hour of news on MSNBC last night, and was on all the social media all day, I didn't hear about Pelosi's comments, or the leaked poll data, until this morning. It wasn't until I looked at the synopsis of Olbermann's podcast that I learned that something had changed. For whatever reason, even though I have made a significant investment in time to stay informed, it isn't working. Fact. #

If something like this happens and you haven't seen it in my linkblog, or on my blog's home page, please post a link to my Mastodon account. #

I added links to my two new podcast feeds to the About page on Scripting News. Screen shot.#

Listen to today's Countdown podcast. I was cheering out loud during the first segment. When you read this post, you'll see why. I tried listening to the NYT Daily podcast today, but it made me hate them all over again, starting with saying how great a week it has been for Trump. You can say that, imho, but you have to say right after that, that it was a terrible week for the rest of us. Because any good news for Trump is awful news for everyone else. And I do mean everyone, including the people who plan to vote for him again. #

Chief Justice John Roberts: “I will decide every case based on the record, according to the rule of law, without fear or favor, to the best of my ability, and I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”#

They edited the Constitution the way board members of tech companies design software products, with no idea how it works.#

My favorite soft drink these days is Coke Cherry Zero. It's got a really nice taste. Went to the store today, they only had one 12-pack, but they also had a 12-pack of Coke Spiced Zero. I decided to give it a try. I had a can at lunch and it's weird but okay I guess, but the belches are strongly flavored and that's realllly weird. It took me a while to figure out where this belch-breath was coming from. It tastes like I took some very strong medicine. The weirdest soft drink I've ever had. But it kind of grows on you. I'll try another one and let you know how it goes. #

I post stuff to Facebook that could get inundated with hateful comments. I have a pretty good idea upfront which ones those are. I go ahead and post them. At the first sign of flameage I turn comments off, with a simple explanation. "I turned off comments here. I didn't want to have a discussion about this, it's just an observation." I think this is totally legit and more people should do it. Really frees you up to say what you see. #

BTW, this is what the new podcast feed looks like viewed in feeder. #

Every day now feels like another January 6.#

Our challenge is to make sure the really interesting stuff happens on the open web, outside the silos. If that happens we can go on. Otherwise we go right back to where we were when Twitter and Facebook dominated. Not a good place. 17 years of stagnation#

A new version of Blogroll Browser. You can now go directly to the OPML version of a blogroll, and to the HTML page we discovered it in. I know all this must seem strange, hard to figure out what's going on. That's how I feel about it too. But I know there's interesting data here, how people are connected to people. I'm still trying to figure out how to make a browser that engages the mind in that. It can take a long time to figure these things out. I had the basic idea for a blog in 1994, but it wasn't until 1999 that we really had it figured out and implemented for non-techies. This may be like that, or the browser might be just around the corner. #

More Blogroll Browser features. Beginnings of a social graph.#

The buggy images of ChatGPT perfectly fit the blogger come as you are ethos. We called this Dogma 2000, the site is gone now, and it's even gone in archive.org. Sad to realize some of the simplest most worthwhile ideas are gone now. #

When talking to ChatGPT think of it as Commander Data on Star Trek, who, in an interesting turnabout is a robot played by a human. Oh the humanity. #

Another month in the archive. Time flies when you're having fun! #