“There will be one thing you do today that would have been difficult or impossible twenty years ago, impossible or unimaginable forty years ago, and unimaginable or half-described in a cheap science fiction paperback sixty years ago.  Look for it.  When you find it, think about it for a minute.  When did it arrive?  Did you notice when it first surfaced into the world?  In twenty years’ time, will it be present, broken, or such an irrelevance that you’ll think about it nostalgically?” — Warren Ellis

James Clear –

Sometimes the first move is the most important. The first set in the gym. Now you’re working out. The first sentence. Now you’re writing. The first call. Now you’re in the game. 

Other times, the last move is the most important. The last brick. Now the building is built. The last line of code. Now the app works. The last round of revisions. Now you can ship it. 

What do you need to focus on right now? First or last? Do you need to start or finish?”

Annie Mueller –

You don’t know how it’s going to work out, if it’s going to work out. Sometimes it becomes obvious that it’s not going to work out, and then you stare at it like, Well what now?

And you don’t know. You have absolutely no idea.

Nicole Auerbach and Scott Dochterman, writing for The Athletic, detail the crazy story of The Big Ten officially approving Oregon and Washington as new members, with competition to begin in all sports in 2024-25.

After much speculation last summer and fall that Washington and Oregon would follow USC and UCLA into the Big Ten, the invite has finally come for the northwest universities. It provides a financial and competitive lifeline to both institutions as the Pac-12 collapses. It also gives USC and UCLA a few travel partners closer to their campuses, which could cut down on their number of cross-country trips.

The conference is probably not done yet. Notre Dame… your table awaits.

Annie Mueller thinks we should take the well-meaning optimization for efficiency and turn it into optimizing for delight.

Less escaping, more transforming.

Lovely.

Shawn Blanc –

When you get a dopamine hit from the false first step of simply buying a product or watching a video that you hope will help you, but you stop at that point without ever taking action or applying anything new to your life.

Dave Pell, writing at his site Nextdraft, has a great summation of the latest Trump indictment

If you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes, you’d accuse Jack Smith of crossing the Hollywood writer’s picket line to write the latest, and by far the most damning, indictment of Donald Trump. But you did see it. Like anyone else with access to a TV and a computer, you were a witness to these crimes. Give yourself some credit. After relentless lying and a coordinated misinformation effort that continues to this day, you still aren’t looking at the world through orange colored glasses. What you saw and heard during Trump’s efforts to overturn an election and cling to power was exactly what happened. We got a lot more details behind the plot from the vital January 6 Committee hearings. And we got a few new details from Jack Smith’s indictment. And you should definitely read that indictment for yourself. The NYT (Gift Article) has an annotated version. But you live in reality, so this will be a re-run. You know what happened. If you were paying attention, you even knew what was going to happen before it did. A few months before the 2020 election, I mentioned to my dad that the numbers looked pretty good for Biden and Trump was starting to lose his grip (political and mental). My dad, who had survived the Holocaust and knew a thing or two about the rise and tactics of strongmen, said, “Yeah, but he’ll never accept the results.”

Around the same time my dad was predicting that Trump would never leave the White House in a normal, orderly transition, The Atlantic’s Barton Gellman wrote his piece, The Election That Could Break America. “The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.”

Trump had been sowing doubt in the election results for years before the election even took place. So we knew he was going to try to cling to power and then we watched him do it real time. And, contrary to Trump’s advice, we believed what we were seeing and hearing. Thankfully, so did Jack Smith.

Just put him and his co-conspiators in jail… like yesterday.

The New York Times began its coverage of Trump’s third indictment thusly:

Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted on Tuesday in connection with his widespread efforts to overturn the 2020 election following a sprawling federal investigation into his attempts to cling to power after losing the presidency to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The indictment was filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington. It accuses Mr. Trump of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States, a second to obstruct an official government proceeding and a third to deprive people of civil rights provided by federal law or the Constitution.

Here we go again. Just more of the same. Trump is a criminal who did criminal things life on TV repeatedly. This isn’t hard to understand. If you want more details, read the full indictment here.

The opening sentences of the very first paragraph in the indictment say it all: “The Defendant, Donald J. Trump, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020. The Defendant lost the 2020 election.”

It looks like four counts. One is conspiracy to defraud, another is conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, another is conspiracy against rights, and then there is a count of obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.

The indictment is a “speaking indictment” that describes the multiple strategies deployed by Trump and six unnamed co-conspirators to overturn the election results that predated the brutal physical violence that occurred during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The interesting thing about it is that they are conspiracy charges. There are co-conspirators, but they are numbered we don’t know their names yet (but it isn’t difficult to figure out who they are). It does look like there might be a number of attorneys implicated.

Trump is finally being held accountable for his bullshit.

Michael Tomasky, writing for The New Republic, hits right out of the part with his coverage.

You have to read only to page six of the third indictment of Donald John Trump to get to the juicy stuff. Or some of the juicy stuff: “The Defendant, his co-conspirators, and their agents knowingly made false claims that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 presidential election. These prolific lies about election fraud include dozens of specific claims that there had been substantial fraud in certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the Defendant to votes for Biden. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false.”

That’s the ball game right there. Prolific lies. The defendant knew they were false. That’s from paragraph 11. Later, from paragraphs 13 through 124, going all the way to page 42, we get a litany of the knowing lies told or bruited by the defendant and his six (uncharged) co-conspirators—but mostly by Trump. The first paragraphs allege conspiracies in certain states to replace legitimate electors and force sham recounts. The January 6–related counts start in paragraph 100 and walk us through the day, and Trump’s actions, hour by hour. The indictment, signed by special counsel Jack Smith on page 45, concludes that “the Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators, known and unknown to the Grand Jury, to injure, impress, threaten, and intimidate one or more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.”

It’s kind of beautiful, really, that it comes down to that simple truth. Whatever good and bad this country has visited upon its citizens, and however much it limited that right to so many of them for so many decades, we did establish for the modern world that simple principle: the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted. It’s the engine of the whole enterprise. Took us a long time to perfect it, and no sooner did we perfect it than certain dark forces started to agitate against it. Those certain dark forces culminated in the person and actions of the defendant. And the system managed to rouse itself and rise up to call bullshit on it.

So, what does this all mean? I think the big thing for Trump is that he needs to understand he is now looking at two separate federal indictments on separate offenses meaning if he is found guilty of both, that will probably impact sentencing. He will not be getting away scot-free here. Although he’s rich and white, I still think he’s going to face some kind of music on this indictment.s

I think that there is probably more that is going to be uncovered here. It’s going to be a major issue for the former president and for the Republican Party. It’s not just a legal thing that is impacting one person or those named in any potential future indictments, it’s also something that is damaging to the Republican Party and the country as a whole.

Democrats will exploit this and should win back a lot of seats in Congress and Biden will win (hopefully) pretty easily. I do wish there was a better (i.e.) younger choices, but that’s coming soon.

Ethan Shanfeld, writing for Variety, reports Paul Reubens, best known for performing as Pee Wee Herman, died Sunday night. He was 70 years old.

Reubens wrote a farewell statement, disclosing his illness and apologizing to fans, which went live after his death.

“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years. I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

Everyone has their favorite moment, but this one is mine.

Nicholas Bate –

1. It all starts with believing that you are creative: ‘I am creative’.

2. As we all are. It’s just some have had more practice and some have had more encouragement and some have had both.

3. Simple tip 1 is to generate quantity of ideas. ‘50 ways to disrupt the competition’. Quantity always guarantees some quality.

4. Simple tip 2 is to disrupt the usual thinking patterns. Thus write the list of fifty whilst standing up. Fresh perspective is all when boosting creativity.

5. Simple tip 3 is to inject the fresh perspective by opening a random page of a book, watching 60 seconds of a car ad……..

6. Simple tip 4 is to try out De Bono’s 6 Thinking Hats.

7. Simple tip 5 is to practise the skill of creativity daily. 

Connor Griffith made this incredible video using images from Wikimedia Commons. The video is a montage of many different awe-inspiring images that feature the microscopic, everyday objects, tall buildings and monuments, the planet, and the universe.

I love it when it goes wide out. So cool.

Tony Temple, writing at The Arcade Blogger, tells the story of his friend Tim Lapetino who miraculously came across an environmental cabinet of the 1983 arcade game Discs of Tron in pristine condition just sitting at the end of a driveway in Chicago in the hopes that the garbage truck would pick it up. Of course, this cabinet is super rare and worth thousands of dollars.

This story makes me sad, happy, and jealous all at once. Discs of Tron was one of my absolute favorite games mostly because I didn’t get to play it very often. In my dream arcade, I have five arcade games: Galaga, Star Trek Strategic Operations Simulator, the original Star Wars arcade game, Mortal Kombat, and Discs of Tron.

Ryan Broderick, writing on his Substack Garbage Day, has some intriguing thoughts on WeChat, Musk and Twitter.

The most recent version of the Twitter logo was designed by three people, built from concentric circles, meant to be read clearly at any size, inspired by the Nike logo. The new X logo is the Unicode character for “𝕏” (U+1D54F), but it also seems like he just grabbed it from an old podcast made by one of his reply guys. Musk also did not check if “X” was trademarked. Nor did he check if the @X account was taken. It was. And the user that once owned it told The Telegraph that it was repossessed this week without any sort of payment. No one at Twitter (I’m going to keep calling it Twitter because I don’t think this will actually last) checked how this would work in other countries, either. For instance, in Japan, one of Twitter’s largest and most important markets, the band X Japan owns the handle @XJapan and the trademark, which is why the @TwitterJP account has to be called “Japan” and use the old Twitter-based handle. Oh, also, apparently, Musk has been trying to name an app “X” since all the way back in his Paypal days.

The unquestionable stupidity of the redesign and its rollout has led many to ask — and attempt an answer at — why this is all happening. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote, “The whole point, from the very beginning, has been to erase the old Twitter and everything it stood for.” And Bloomberg’s Matt Levine wrote, “Musk didn’t want Twitter for its employees (whom he fired) or its code (which he trashes regularly) or its brand (which he abandoned) or its most dedicated users (whom he is working to drive away); he just wanted an entirely different Twitter-like service. Surely he could have built that for less than $44 billion? Mark Zuckerberg did!”

My personal philosophy, with regards to both Musk and, also, everything in life, is that the stupidest, laziest, most embarrassing thing that could have happened probably did. My read on Twitter being clumsily stripped for parts and turned into a vague WeChat clone with a name that sounds like a porn site is that Musk made the mistake that all Twitter power users make. At the height of the pandemic, he became obsessed with the app and assumed that it was, one, popular and mattered, and, two, that his experience of it was universal. And so, the answer to “why is he turning Twitter in WeChat” is because he simply cannot imagine an internet beyond Twitter, just like all the users still using it currently. He wants his own WeChat because he wants to control all of human life both on Earth and beyond and he can’t conceive of other websites mattering more than Twitter because Twitter makes him feel good when he posts memes. As far as I’m concerned, Musk is simply doing the billionaire equivalent of when someone breathlessly explains insular Twitter drama at you irl like it’s the news. He thinks Twitter is real life and he’s willing to light as much of his fortune on fire as possible to literally force that to be true. Now matter how cringe it is.

I still stand by my opinion that we are just going to get more, smaller, different Twitters. I mean, TikTok has decided to enter the Twitter wars, announcing this week that they’re launching text posts. And Threads has finally rolled out a version of a chronological tab. And Mastodon is on the rise again. And Bluesky is… well, keep reading, we’ll get to Bluesky. Though, I don’t even think Twitter will even “die” anymore, unless its servers literally go offline. But if you want a point of no return for it ever really “coming back,” I think this is it.

“…smaller, different Twitters” seems about right.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was escorted away from the cameras during a news conference yesterday after he froze and appeared unable to continue speaking.

Odd moment: McConnell freezes at start of Senate GOP leadership press conference and is escorted to the side by his colleagues pic.twitter.com/hT5bLnstOS

— Raquel Martin (@RaquelMartinTV) July 26, 2023

It looks to me like he had a mini-stroke.

Robert Reich, writing in his Substack, has a different take.

Thirty-five years ago I was giving a luncheon speech about the economy to members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington.

In the middle of my speech, the person who had introduced me asked if I was okay and offered me a glass of water. I was puzzled by his question, which seemed to come from out of nowhere. I declined the water and continued with my speech.

That night, I received a phone call from someone who said he had attended my speech. He explained that he was a physician, and asked if I knew that I had had a petite mal seizure in the middle of the speech.

“You froze for about 30 seconds,” he said. “Your eyes fluttered. You were offered a glass of water. Do you remember?”

I was flabbergasted. “No,” I said. I told him that I recalled being offered the water, but had no memory of any interruption in my speech.

“That’s what I thought. That’s why I called you. You may want to have it checked out.”

I thanked him and got off the phone, deeply shaken.

The very idea that my brain had skidded — that I had frozen for thirty seconds and not been aware of it, let alone that it had occurred in front of several hundred people — shocked me to the core.

…

The neurologist I saw some days later explained that epilepsy affects over 1 percent of the population, and a larger percent experience one or two seizures during their lifetimes. The cause? He shrugged. “We know as much about the brain as we do the dark side of the moon.” (I assume some progress has been made over the last thirty-five years, but most of it remains a mystery.)

Again, I can’t presume to say what caused McConnell to freeze. He is 81 years old. Yesterday’s incident took place about four months after he fell and suffered a concussion and a broken rib at a private dinner at a Washington.

But I commiserate with what McConnell may be going through. For someone in public life whose every movement and utterance is consequential, it must be terrifying.

I find much of what Mitch McConnell has done as leader of the Senate Republicans repugnant.

Yet on another level, he and I — and all of you reading this — share the same terrifying fragilities of being human. I wish him well.

I would not shed a tear if something untoward happened to him.

Matt Schimkowitz, writing for the AVClub, has the latest story about how Elon Musk is just the worst.

Ah, Elon Musk, the patron saint of being unfunny online and letting everyone know about it. After spending the last 10 months turning Twitter into a deteriorating wasteland of Cheech & Chong cannabis ads, Musk recently achieved his lifelong dream of owning a company called X. Not that he did too much work for the rebrand. The son of an Emerald Mine owner got the X logo from one of his fans. Actually, neither had to work too hard. The now-infamous “𝕏” that’s slowly and awkwardly replacing the globally recognized Twitter logo comes from a publicly available font that costs about $30. 𝕏 may be “the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking,” but it’s also a lazy rebrand from a desperate man hemorrhaging money after being forced into buying a website because a joke went too far.

However, despite spending $30 on the company’s logo, Musk still had one more change to make. The company’s X handle, which until yesterday was “@Twitter,” needed an update.

Enter Gene X. Hwang, the former holder of @x, who unceremoniously had his name stolen by the owner of a car company where the steering wheel falls off when you drive. Speaking to Mashable, Hwang says he “got an email basically saying they are taking it.” At one point, Mashable notes, Twitter reportedly considered creating a service that would allow users to big on rare or unused handles. That wasn’t the case here. True to his brand of not paying people, Musk offered Hwang nothing for his handle besides “some merch” for one of the most radioactive brands on Earth and a meeting with “management if I like.”

What a dick. I really like Matt’s line, “the patron saint of being unfunny online and letting everyone know about it.” Just spot on.  

Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor has died at the age of 56, her family announced. It hasn’t been announced as a suicide, but I’m sure that’s the case.

Keith Harris, writing for Rolling Stone, has a great obituary on the singer. This paragraph probably encapsulates her career more than any I’ve read.

Though her singing was passionate and sensual, O’Connor avoided the clichéd images that often straitjacketed female rock stars of that era. She was neither a girlish sexpot nor a hippie free spirit nor a posturing tough chick, and her fiercely idiosyncratic personal style — shaved head, emotionally ambiguous facial expressions, loose outfits — helped younger female artists discover new ways to reinvent themselves.

Obviously, “Nothing Compares 2 U” was a worldwide hit. To many, she had albums worth of material just as fantastic. Her voice was incredible, but she never really resonated with me personally.

She was, however, right about the Catholic church, and her personal experience reverberated with her throughout her life. I hope she has finally found peace.

Whistleblower David Grusch, a former representative on the U.S. Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) Task Force, testified under oath this morning that the U.S. government has in its possession “non-human” remains of UFO pilots.

C-SPAN has the fun clip.

.@RepNancyMace asks about extraterrestrials: "If you believe we have crashed craft...do we have the bodies of the pilots...?"

David Grusch: "As I've stated...biologics came with some of these recoveries."

Mace: "Were they Human or non-human?"

Grusch: "Non-human." pic.twitter.com/TJVbIRp4jw

— CSPAN (@cspan) July 26, 2023

I’ll just be over here waiting for the actual evidence.

Shawn Blanc –

A few symptoms of an unfocused life include things like: reacting to daily fires; feeling unsure about the future; lacking any margin / breathing room; unclear goals; no plan forward; procrastination.

Compared to a focused life where you are in control; clear long-term vision and goals; easily able to make decisions with confidence; thriving (even when things are unusually busy); ensuring that important relationships and responsibilities always come first and get your priority; you have a bias toward action.

The @threadsapp account has announced a chronological tab.

The For you feed includes a mix of posts from profiles you follow and recommended accounts. Following shows you posts from profiles you’re following, starting with the most recent.

To switch from For you to Following, tap on the Threads icon at the top of your feed and swipe.

This is needed, but the web app is what everyone really wants. I want that too, plus the ability to create lists. I mean, a Threads version of Tweetdeck would really make me happy, but I’m not holding my breath for that.

Adam B. Vary, writing for Variety, has a fun story about William T. Riker himself Jonathan Frakes, looking back at his directing career. He’s such a good director.