The Content Lab
The Content Lab

  • When something has ads, I’m tempted to look for an ad-free alternative. Did so with:

    • Google: Kagi
    • WP: micro.blog
    • Twitter: Mastodon

    Also (ad free) YouTube Premium 1 was a revelation.

    1. The only streaming service I don’t get through a bundle or subsidy. ↩︎

  • Most important WWDC for Apple since the 1990 one that featured a VHS tape with a conference walkaround and a HyperCard stack that cataloged all the attendees.

  • SNES edition of the New Nintendo 3DS XL, with purple Panasonic earbuds whose purple hue matches the mock Power and Reset buttons almost exactly. User-replaceable Li-ion battery; I have three in reserve, you know, just in case.

    The Super Nintendo edition of the New Nintendo 3DS XL, with Panasonic earbuds.

  • The red queen has ruled

    Out not having colorblindness

    After seeing this scene and decreeing

    It “Another green world”

    A green bush with red flowers behind a sidewalk in front of a school

  • Anything called “content” is in danger, b/c that term centers the platform owner—not the artist. And those owners will, say, remove a bunch of “original content” from their streaming service to reduce their tax bill. This is also why the decline of optical discs, with their quasi-permanence, is bad.

  • So much depends

    On an orange cat

    Brushed by breeze

    By the also-orange bricks

    An orange cat sitting in a windowsill. A side alley between brick houses is visible to the right over her shoulder. The interior of the house with plants and ornaments is visible to her left.

  • Milkweed coming along nicely

    Milkweed plants in the garden by a hose

  • Retreat? Retreat!

    Attic Greek has two words with substantially different meanings that both translate into English as “love.” I won’t spoil the fun; look up their differences, as a little treat.

    These types of word complexities reveal an overloadedness to certain English worlds, “free” being another great example 1. So in Greek class 19 years ago, we had a little fun with:

    Dikaeopolis loved his pretty plow

    Something milder is going on with the word “retreat” as often used by academics and Catholics 2 plus all-remote organizations.

    There’s:

    • Retreat (nay!): Giving up on your reply-all hell thread, marriage, and so on; painfully generating the grist you’ll need later on for your LinkedIn content mill that’ll become a staple of r/LinkedInLunatics
    • Retreat (yay!): Having a long but catered and relatively fun meeting, performing a chill religious ritual, or finally meeting up with the person you’ve only ever seen say “sorry there’s an echo” on Microsoft Teams to have beer 3.

    The difference is nicely cleft depending on whether “retreat” is used as a verb (nay!) or a noun (yay!).

    But there’s also a “nay/yay” one that straddles these lines for Catholics in particular, I imagine.

    The Catholic Church is known for its extreme anti-birth control stance. So someone who’s having presumably a good time but who’s also weirdly orthodox in their views and likes to court some risk could find themselves needing to…beat a retreat, or go on a retreat to stay faithful.

    Maybe the plow could help them out?

    The cover of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon

    1. Think “free as in beer” vs “free as in speech,” which necessitated the evolution of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) into Free/Libre and Open Source Software. This issue doesn’t exist in Spanish, which has gratis and libre to differentiate these concepts. ↩︎

    2. And academic Catholics?—they’re just perpetually, immaculately retreating. ↩︎

    3. Teams is one of the worst macOS apps I’ve ever used. A total energy hog that’s almost always the “reason” in “you’re breaking up for some reason.” ↩︎

  • When you call everything content you treat it as:

    • interchangeable
    • capable of being made by a machine
    • beholden to the container owner

    The name of this blog sprung from the (badly mistaken) idea that everything can just be formulaically brewed up in a lab. You can make drivel that way, but not art.

    Two paintings at a gallery. A woman looks at them from the left. A man at the right looks into the background at something unseen.

  • Drive My Car was exceptional—my favorite movie of the 2020s so far.

    A still from the film “Drive My Car,”&10;Showing a man saying “But the world seemed serene, as if nothing had changed.”

  • The U.S. Constitution and conservative sophistry

    Conservatives love to say they’re “originalists” who’re just upholding the sacred principles of the Founders. So you often get disingenuous statements like these that need heavy decoding:

    I believe that the Constitution 1 should be interpreted literally 2 and in keeping with the intent of the Founding Fathers 3 at the time of the Founding 4.

    1. Only through the 12th Amendment. Amendments 14 and 15 in particular don’t count at all. ↩︎

    2. Except for the 2nd Amendment and probably the 8th Amendment, too, while we’re at it. Those get read more…liberally. ↩︎

    3. But not the author of the Declaration of Independence (Thomas Jefferson) or the architect of the Constitution (James Madison), who together lost the court case (Marbury v. Madison) that created judicial review. We still love using James' silhouette as the logo of our weirdo legal debating society, though! ↩︎

    4. With exactly 9 justices as codified almost 100 years afterward in a law signed by Ulysses Grant, and not with any of the varying numbers that prevailed before that time. ↩︎

  • Hello world! 1

    Trying it out here to see if I might like it.

    Here’s my cat helping me paint.

    IMG 1736

    1. Written from MarsEdit in Markdown! ↩︎