Jason Pettus :blobrainbow: / is on Nostr

Chicago-based writer and photographer, rare-book dealer and indie lit book editor. Blog: write.as/jasonpettus | ilikejason@gmail.com

AI PLEDGE: I promise that all content on this page has been, and will always be, created with a human brain and human fingers, never with an AI bot.

Last Notes

2024-08-16 14:39:25

#RIP #GregKihn, who started his career as a laid-back pop musician in '70s San Francisco, before becoming one of the vaulted One Hit Wonders of my '80s youth with "Jeopardy." He's fallen into obscurity now, because his '80s look didn't feature the cartoony New Wave that's usually the focus of retro nostalgia, but you couldn't get AWAY from this song in summer 1983 when it first came out, at the beginning of my high-school years which is why it looms so large in my life. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/15/arts/music/greg-kihn-dead.html

2024-08-09 02:06:11

#TodayILearned that Vatican City, the world's smallest independent country (comprising the grounds of the Vatican, headquarters of the Catholic Church) has had an international athletics association since 2019 consisting of various nuns, priests and Swiss Guard members, which has now participated in cycling, cricket, marathon and taekwondo competitions, but hasn't yet qualified to send a team to the Olympics. (They're still trying!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Athletics

2024-08-09 01:10:19

Who knew that the rules for Olympic-level cycling were so complicated?! Turns out the winner isn't just the first person across the finish line, but rather that riders earn points for engaging in certain behaviors during certain periods of the race, such as lapping everyone else during certain laps but not others, or going fast when everyone is supposed to go fast but NOT going fast when people AREN'T supposed to go fast. I didn't last long with this one, to be honest. https://www.cyclingnews.com/features/tokyo-olympics-what-is-the-omnium/

2024-07-11 15:37:40

Oh yeah, and after moderating what was largely considered a fluff interview with Biden designed expressly to prop up his candidacy, George Stephanopoulos was secretly caught on a microphone saying immediately afterwards, "I don't think he can serve another four years." In the future, historians will paint these days as the stars neatly aligning in a fated and inevitable way towards a Trump-led Christian Nationalist takeover of America. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/business/media/tmz-george-stephanopoulos-biden.html

2024-07-07 16:23:59

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@npub1w9a…04m0 Oh, I don't know about that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl9KQ1Mub6Q

2024-06-29 01:03:33

Breaking News: Elderly Baby Boomer Doesn't Care HOW Fucking Incompetent He Is, He's Gonna KEEP Working 80-Hour Weeks Until He Slumps Over Dead In His OFFICE Chair, And There's Nothing You Can DO About It, Fuck You Very MUCH https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K4L6o_eQk4

2024-06-13 22:07:50

An insane version of Pong that doubles the balls every time one hits a paddle, then adds various power-ups to make the game even crazier. Thanks as always for the interesting link, @npub1typ…c8hh! https://raould.github.io/pn0gstr0m/

2024-04-27 15:59:08

I'm participating in the annual Chicago Bookstore Crawl today! The goal is to visit 18 stores by 5 pm, so we'll see how I do. Here, store #2 of my journey, the neighborhood-beloved 57th Street Books, near the campus of the University of Chicago.
https://media.mastodon.cloud/media_attachments/files/112/344/009/740/405/831/original/e6110e961508f413.jpg

2024-04-12 13:20:47

Saw a friend of a friend here talking about how the AI bubble is the biggest bubble in the history of the tech industry, and therefore its inevitable burst will be the most damaging bubble burst of them all, one that will likely destroy the entire venture capital industry and bring an end altogether to the Startup Age we've been living through the last 30 years, and its three distinct eras (the Dot Com years, the Web 2.0 years, and our current web3 years). Fascinating theory, I must admit!

2024-03-22 00:55:08

Watching the 1978 Battlestar Galactica this month for literally the first time since it was on the air when I was nine years old. Had no idea that the special effects were done by Star Wars veteran John Dykstra, and that the pilot's dogfights look almost exactly like the attack on the Death Star. It's SHOCKING how high-quality the pilot is even now, compared to what most other '70s genre television looked like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2eG3Zf3Jo

2024-03-14 18:46:55

These are exactly the kinds of articles at the Tor website I love the most, where they recommend ten books I've never heard of, but that all sound fairly amazing. https://reactormag.com/ten-classic-books-i-read-as-a-teen-that-still-hold-up/

2024-01-11 23:58:05

Ha, the whole time I've been friends with him at Mastodon, I've thought that journalist Clive Thompson (@npub1typ…c8hh) was the author of the seminal 1984 book "Hackers," but I just realized that's actually Steven Levy. Thompson's book is from 2019 and is called "Coders."
https://media.mastodon.cloud/media_attachments/files/111/740/014/399/226/020/original/6b283f04ad92b7a6.jpg

2024-01-09 20:32:28

#TodayILearned that Bing Crosby was the world's very first major investor in magnetic recording tape, specifically so he could record his daily live New York show and re-broadcast it in California later. He spent today's equivalent of several million dollars on the first experimental machines, thus allowing for more R&D and arguably laying the groundwork for the entire resulting computer industry. Thanks, @npub1typ…c8hh! https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-bing-crosby-made-silicon-valley

2023-08-14 23:55:33

I've talked before about the brilliance of free streaming service Tubi, but this article gets it all wrong; it's not great because they say "let's just collect all the movies we possibly can," but rather because some smart nerds there are carefully acquiring great old movies that few people have heard of or that have otherwise disappeared from the cultural consciousness. https://lifehacker.com/what-is-tubi-and-how-to-watch-it-free-1850736811

2023-08-14 23:30:02

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@npub1hvz…mle9 In that article, you should also talk about the ethics of changing punctuation (like a period to an exclamation mark), like a lot of movie studios do. That leads a review that says something like, "Only in a world where no other movies exist could this ever be considered great." to eventually appear in the movie trailer as "...Great! --Aint It Cool News".

2023-08-09 18:35:12

Out of all the bread products I've made in the last year and a half, I must admit that kaiser rolls are particularly delightful, mostly because it's so fun to actually make the shapes (which is basically like a sandwich version of a pretzel). Many home cooks buy a cheap "kaiser pattern" to just stamp on the top of round buns, but I encourage you to do the actual rolling and folding, because the results (which you'll see in the next post) are spectacular.
https://media.mastodon.cloud/media_attachments/files/110/861/096/003/199/812/original/36d74ddf401820f4.jpeg