Die Hard at 30: how it remains the quintessential American action movie: “The lesson of Die Hard, however, is that the small, incidental details are just as consequential – and often exactly what’s missing from the films that tried to emulate it.”
Geekery
Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.
Test post. micro.blog cross posting to Facebook stopped working. Seeing if turning it off and on again does the trick. If this shows up on Facebook in a few minutes, I’m good.
Guidelines for Brutalist Web Design. I’m entirely on board with this (and, actually, my current personal website’s design isn’t all that far away from this aesthetic).
The audio from Trump’s bizarre and incoherent “I have no organ, the only musical is the mouth, the brain is much more important” ramble is just begging to be sampled into any number of songs. Just sayin’.
Book twenty-seven of 2016: So You Want to Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Book twenty-six of 2018: Tim’rous Beastie, edited by Amanda Lafrenais. 🌟🌟🌟
Book twenty-five of 2018: Bored of the Rings, by Henry N. Beard and Douglas C. Kenney of the Harvard Lampoon. ⭐️⭐️
Book twenty-four of 2018: Independence Day, by Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich, and Stephen Molstad. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Who is reading your Gmail?
Gmail users, be aware: “Gmail has 1.4 billion email users. Every one of those users has agreed to terms of service that give third parties permission to read their email. And, of course that’s just what they do.”
Admittedly, this summary is slightly alarmist (but only slightly), as you do need to have given permission by signing up for an offer or service that performs this sort of activity. But that’s not exactly an unlikely scenario for many people.
Just one more reason why I’ve done my best to move away from Gmail whenever possible. While I still have a Gmail account, I moved to Apple’s mail services a few years back, and the Gmail account is little more than a spam and “I need to either unsubscribe or update my email settings” catcher at this point. I’d have nuked it entirely if I could figure out how to transfer my various Google accounts to a different email (which they don’t seem to be interested in letting you do, or at least telling you how to do so).
Yes, Apple’s another Big Company, and there are those who distrust them as well. But I trust Apple’s privacy stance much, much more than I do Google’s. It’s been a long time since I put much stock in Google’s late, lamented, “Don’t be evil” philosophy.
Book twenty-three of 2018: Outland, by Alan Dean Foster. 🌟🌟
