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This plaque, designed by Carl Sagan, is etched onto the inner core of the LAGEOS satellite: a mirror ball that serves solely to reflect lasers enabling exact measurements of continental drift (among other things). The date of re-entry is presumed to be so many millions of years in the future that the plaque will serve as an explanation to anyone that may find it of it’s time spent in orbit - dated by continental drift.

today I got coffee with my most outrageously stereotypical raised-in-Manhattan friend and he was using a Zabar's receipt as a bookmark which felt like a bit much

"Repent, Harlan Ellison!" Said the Tik Tok Man

—Headline for whenever a Tik Tok influencer posts about how Harlan Ellison is Problematic

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My favorite part of the Wikipedia entry for the Harlan Ellison short story "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man" is the sentence "Stylistically, the story deliberately ignores many "rules of good writing", including a paragraph about jelly beans which is almost entirely one run-on sentence" insofar as it implies jelly beans break a rule of good writing

An investigation shows how Amazon plastic shipping envelopes, discarded for recycling by US and Canadian consumers, end up being burned in Muzaffarnagar, India (K Oanh Ha/Bloomberg)

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-india-plastic-recycling-pollution/
http://www.techmeme.com/221227/p11#a221227p11

German security researchers studying biometric capture devices popular with the U.S. military got more than they expected for $68 on eBay: A military database of fingerprints and iris scans for 2,632 people from Afghanistan and Iraq. It wasn't a one-time mistake. A second SEEK II device they bought had the biometric profiles of American service members. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/technology/for-sale-on-ebay-a-military-database-of-fingerprints-and-iris-scans.html

His owners I think go with "Tort" a lot which is fine but also makes me think of lawsuits which is the opposite of dog vibes

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Still think about the dog in our neighborhood named Tortellini and how calling to him must be such a pain

newsletter soft launch 

buttondown.email/perfectsenten

this newsletter is mostly for fun and also to help me be a more attentive reader; it's pay what you want and very low stakes/volume. First newsletter will be out on January 1.

More or less since 2018 my main Christmas activity has just been to go hard on cleaning the apartment and honestly I'm really looking forward to it

I'm listening to the audiobook of The Power Broker and it's narrated by the same guy who did the audiobook of William Gibson's Zero History. He's a good reader, but I keep wondering when Milgrim is gonna show up.

a feature @sam and I have been talking about adding to horse town is custom css so people on the instance can deck our their profile pages, this feels more important to me than The Discourse

"no quadrilaterals on my website" will definitely make people subscribe to my newsletters lol

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designing a new website for ecommerce/newsletter stuff and fighting the urge to make incredibly unhinged design decisions like "what if the page slowly disintegrates if you leave it alone for too long" or "what if everything is tilted at a 3-degree angle"

setting up baby's first cron job, please wish me luck

trying to figure out a good price for selling an annual subscription for the plotter postcards I've thus far been sending only to Patreon supporters. $50/year for 4 plotter drawings ($12.50 each) is my ballpark based on like, cost of wear and tear on the machine, materials, and time, but I don't know if that's a realistic amount for someone to pay for four 4x6 plotter drawings.

Some of my closest friendships emerged from that web page. The apartment I've lived in for the last five years? We took over the lease from friends I met on twitter, and who I first met IRL when they invited me over to this apartment to hang out and watch a movie to take my mind off my dad recently dying. Twitter hasn't really been that kind of online place in a long time, but it's weird and sad to think about the role it played in my stupid little life.

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cross-posting: I know it's stupid but when my dad died 9 years ago a lot of people I only knew from twitter showed up for me and it meant a lot, so as I get extra messy and sad leading up to the anniversary of his death this week there's also some weird grief for twitter in there too

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Horsin' Around

This is a hometown instance run by Sam and Ingrid, for some friends.