If these are technical manuals, I see no issue.

But fucking fiction?

I cannot imagine how it must feel to be an American at the moment.

It is frankly a raft of emotions that changes by the hour, but none is positive.

I’ve neither the inclination nor energy to relitigate the details of 24-year-old events. Rest assured, we agree on what the outcome really was; this was when we as a nation stopped believing in voting.

Do you want to know more?

This feels like a “may be able to” situation. Once they’ve completed a flight from New York to London, I can get on board with the notion of them being able to fly from New York to London.

Shit. You’re right.

This cannot be taught. I really wish it could, don’t get me wrong, but it just can’t.

We would not be here if this were possible. Something about rhyming, but I’m sorry, when Hitler is what you’re quoting, this becomes a different conversation.

I have read Mein Kampf. I’ve never read anything so poorly written, and I’ve dealt with a lot of junior reporters. Hitler should have stuck to speeches.

The problem here is we’re talking about Hitler. You generally don’t want to go there.

“But my phone said it would be OK” is a lousy epitaph!

It is irrelevant what anyone on Beehaw thinks if Mrs. Hedge isn’t a fan.

This is the correct take. Hence my worry.

We got used to foreign call centers. They’re not incompetent, but the wording is always off, and I say this as someone whose English usage is not exclusively American. Took me weeks to drop the Aussie accent.

Burnout is real, and it shows up well ahead of when we think it does ourselves. I frankly find it impressive and respectable that he was like, “well, I’m not doing what I used to, and I don’t know how to get back there, so I have a single option.” And that his wife believed enough in the work to just pick it up where he left off.

ETA: here’s his final post

From our other interactions, I’m going to suggest:

Cracking the Cryptic … it can be oddly satisfying to watch them solve a puzzle.

Anton Petrov for space news.

If you’re not familiar with Sabine Hossenfelder, I’d be very surprised, but she’s great for wider physics.

Robert Reich is doing some great things these days. The Saturday Coffee Klatsch is a must-watch for me, even if it gets a little predictable.

Beau of the Fifth Column, whom I’m aware from an earlier post is not highly regarded, burned out, and his wife has continued the channel. Rarely more then 5 minutes, and there’s never footage, just the news and quality analysis.

I’m getting somewhat tired of Bryan Tyler Cohen’s clickbait bullshit, but his panelists can be helpful in unpacking news.

Hope these are somewhat helpful!

1:42 into this, and “above the fold” – while defined correctly within the scope of newspaper layout – somehow ignores the ear ads that have been showing up for decades. Hell, I was involved in redesigns where the big question was “OK, but how do we fit more ads in there?”

This is in fact how one gets from a good design decision to offending readers with an unfulfilled promise, and this ain’t coding.

In the early aughts, there was a fad for taking up newshole just inside the paper to … tell readers what was in the paper. No one is buying something off the rack to open it to A2 to figure out what the refers are, but some metros were doing it, and midsize dailies tended to be lemmings 20 years ago.

I went several rounds with editors, folks from advertising and even higher-ups at The Washington Post (for unusual reasons) crafting what Page 2 would consist of. Upper half of the page was pretty much set in stone, with 4-col art that somehow needed to be demoted to A2 because we rarely went bigger than 3 cols out front (you try fitting nine stories plus at least three pieces of art, refers, index, blacklines [obit names], weather and anything else out front on a 44" web down from full broadsheet).

The bottom half was another story. Early on, it was decided that we’d have most of the bottom half of the page be a story we called (I shit you not) “A Closer Look” (I did it first, Seth). The idea was we had about 30" to play with and could run a wire story that was interesting but not A1 worthy … not exactly a feature, just news that wasn’t paper-of-record news. This concept would reappear out front downpage at a later paper, where it was called “Editor’s Choice.”

Once ads was done with that voodoo they do so well in terms of selling positions, we had on a good day 10" for A Closer Look, leading to it being internally referred to as A Cursory Glance. To the point that within two weeks, even the managing ed would ask in the budget meeting what we had for A Cursory Glance that evening as the guy who insisted on keeping the overline as “A Closer Look,” as that’s what he sold the publisher on.

I’m morbidly curious to continue watching and will from here, but Google didn’t invent shitty ad placement that insulted their audience anymoreso than Apple invented flat, rounded rectangles; print was there around 9/11 (and before, if one considers the precursor to “native advertising,” “sponsored content” – that editorial-looking stuff in the wrong typeface saying that, for example, you could only buy these exclusive silver coins during a half-hour window based on ZIP Code).

This is the logical continuation of unregulated late-stage capitalism. Pretending it’s about tech is certainly a framing choice, but it isn’t the right one.

I don’t know that it’s influential so much as formulaic. It’s been working for them for decades. And without it, we’d never have gotten Schweddy Balls, and that’s a worse timeline.

For real fun, submit your resume (that shit’s already all over online; Google can have it) and listen to NPR hosts take 7 minutes to describe your career arc.

You point out the nuance quite well. Regardless of whether I think having kids is good, forbidding people from doing so is at best eugenics and at worst genocide (not that there’s a lot of air between the two).

Only a true visionary could have foreseen YouTube in 1982!

Thanks for the explanation and apology. No harm done … using the second person when talking about contentious issues can be pretty fraught, so I just wanted to let you know how I received it.

To your last point, you’re dead wrong. I’m not whipped into anything, but thanks for the personal attack (not just on me, but on the gestures broadly “y’all”) with zero basis. That’s not Beehaw etiquette.

I’m far to the left of the current U.S. Overton window, so being cast as aligned with neoliberalism is laughable. As far as I can tell, your argument is that everyone for whom Gaza isn’t their only deciding factor in a U.S. election supports genocide. That’s certainly an opinion.

If you don’t care about any dead child above 17,000, you’ve made a fine argument. But now you’re saying more deaths is fine (and better than current policy) because you’ve reached some tipping point where more suffering and death is actually preferable to … what? A Democrat in the White House? Your logic doesn’t work within your own argument.

This is very common among single-issue voters. As another example: abortion. Plenty of people who think Trump is heinous vote for him based on that issue alone (something the GOP has been using to great effect for the past 30 years), and accept whatever else his cronies get him to enact because they perceive him as “wanting to get rid of abortion.”

If your think the suffering of Palestinians is the greatest domestic issue facing the U.S., dwarfing all others combined, by all means let it guide your choice. But don’t complain about the internment camps that start getting built if Trump wins when you found everything else in this election irrelevant.

Six hundred Nader votes in Florida going to Gore instead 24 years ago would have put this country on a very different trajectory, so it is not hyperbole that staying home or voting for the other guy can result in an even worse outcome.